Grass Helper
The Grass network is growing rapidly on Solana, reaching more and more phones every day. Join this community before it's too late.
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https://app.getgrass.io/register/?referralCode=3e4aV0bDMQ1klT5
Wynd Network, the team behind Grass, has announced the successful completion of a $3.5 million seed round led by Polychain Capital & Tribe Capital. The seed round brings Wynd’s total funding to $4.5M after a pre-seed round led by No Limit Holdings.
Launched in June, Grass is a decentralized web scraping network with a focus on turning public web data into AI datasets. The network intends to mobilize millions of home internet connections for use in scraping and verifying data from the web. This type of web data, collected in bulk, is integral to the development of AI models and the operations of many other industries.
According to its founders, web scraping can benefit considerably from a decentralized model.
"As a decentralized oracle for AI, Grass will produce datasets that can be traced back to their origin, making it possible to compensate people fairly for their contribution to the network,” said founders. “We’ve explored many ways to make public web data more accessible to open source AI projects, and believe that decentralization is the only way to achieve this both ethically and efficiently"
Additional funding for the round was provided by Bitscale, Big Brain, Advisors Anonymous, Typhon V, Mozaik, and more. Funding will be strategically utilized to enhance Grass's technological infrastructure, expanding its network of nodes and refining the data verification process.
https://www.getgrass.io/blog/grass-raises-3-5-million-seed-round-to
Grass didn’t invent the residential proxy network, but we are trying to reinvent it. Our goal is simple: create a decentralized network where ordinary people can make some extra cash selling their unused internet. You pay the internet bill every month - why pay full price if you’re only using half of it?
It’s not a new idea, and proxy networks have existed for years. Today, however, the business has been captured by commercial networks that extract profit by under compensating you for the bandwidth you sell. Many of them obtain your bandwidth through unscrupulous methods, and may not compensate you at all. It’s not right, and that’s why today, we want to tell you in clear and simple terms how we differ from the competition and why we think this is so important.
Today we discuss a topic very near to our hearts: how to reform an industry by creating a network that is owned by the people, for the people’s benefit. So read on to learn more about how you can grow your share of the network, and your share of the profits.
The Origin of Residential Proxy Networks
Believe it or not, residential proxy networks didn’t begin as a business at all. The concept originated in the early 2000s, when new anonymity networks started introducing residential components.
These networks were popularized at the time, allowing users to surf the web without fear of surveillance. Just jump on a browser and your traffic is routed through a network of volunteer nodes all around the world. Your location and usage are concealed from outside scrutiny, allowing users to bypass censorship and intrusive government oversight - a pretty big deal for people living under oppressive regimes. If you were living in a warzone, for example, maybe you’d want to read the news from the rest of the planet.
Now, many of the volunteer nodes were hosted by individuals, so if a person in a country with low digital freedom used the network to access the internet, they were often routing their traffic through residential IPs, just like they do today. These projects were motivated by the belief that privacy is a human right, and they built networks where individuals could help each other access the open web. It’s a great concept, and modern residential proxy networks were built on this foundation.
So what happened?
Well, things went commercial.
The Commercial Model
Ultimately, proxy networks have a simple design. There are sellers (home internet users with extra bandwidth), and buyers (E-commerce companies, adtech agencies, and anyone who needs an unbiased view of the public web). A network is created to connect these two sides, and the rest is just details.
The details, it turns out, are somewhat important.
When you monetize this system, it gets a lot less idealistic. Buyers will pay a certain amount for the sellers’ bandwidth, and the prices are often quite high - but then the network steps in. Without the network, the transaction is impossible, so in many cases it ends up as a middleman that can charge whatever it wants - or extract as much value as it can.
Here’s what happens when human greed steps in.
In recent years, we’ve seen the emergence of commercial proxy networks. Like any business, this involves a private enterprise using its resources to provide a service. But what happens when a private enterprise goes into business selling a collective resource? Your bandwidth belongs to you, but the second you sign up with a traditional network, it belongs to them! Users have no choice but to accept the terms of the agreement, whatever they are. Typically, the terms are pretty simple: their network, their profits.
The result is a lopsided system in which the masses supply a product, but a small number of private owners extract most of the value. Your payout is viewed as a liability, and maximizing their own profit requires them by definition to minimize yours. Users are often paid pennies on the dollar for the bandwidth they sell, because the game theory of the situation dictates that the network is enemies with its users! Buyers and sellers are in fact counterparties to a parasitic network interested only in maximizing its own gain.
And that’s what they are: parasites.
Parasitic Proxies
It’s bad enough that the majority of proxy networks don’t compensate their users fairly, but that’s only the beginning. Ask yourself this:
When you get rich selling other people’s bandwidth and squeezing them for the proceeds, what can you do to make even more money?
Two possibilities come to mind:
- Paying users less
- Onboarding more of them
As it turns out, there’s one strategy that seamlessly combines both of these: tricking people into joining the network, and not paying them for it!
For years now, unscrupulous commercial networks have been doing exactly that. Take a look at one example, the VPN network known as HolaVPN.
HolaVPN was designed as a peer-to-peer VPN network. Theoretically, it functioned like any other VPN - if you wanted to watch Netflix but it was geoblocked in your region, for example, you could log on and route your traffic through a server in another country. Boom, problem solved. The only difference was that you were routing your traffic through another user’s IP, rather than a secure server provided by the network. It goes without saying, of course, that your IP was also getting used just as much by other users.
Here’s the thing, though: in 2015, HolaVPN was rocked by a scandal involving - you guessed it - a commercial proxy network. While HolaVPN was purported to be a free, peer-to-peer VPN network, the owners had been selling bandwidth to private companies all along. You thought you were helping some kid watch Netflix, when in actuality, the owners were raking in millions from selling your bandwidth to buyers and keeping it all for themselves.
HolaVPN is just one example of this, too! There have been dozens of other cases where commercial networks bribe developers or even app store employees to let them sneak their software into unrelated apps. Any user who downloads these apps becomes an involuntary seller of bandwidth on the network, and they never get paid a cent. It’s not illegal, but it’s definitely not right.
Let’s not paint with a broad brush. Not all, or even most proxy networks resort to unscrupulous tactics like this. But amongst the commercial networks that take a cut for selling your bandwidth, squeezing as much of the profit as they can for themselves is the rule. As long as the ownership of a network is concentrated in a few people’s hands, they will always be incentivized to treat users as unfairly as they can get away with and maximizing their own cut.
Our Solution
So now you understand why Grass is so important. The point of this project is to turn that model on its head by collectivizing ownership of the network.
Because Grass will be tokenized, its design is fundamentally different from traditional proxy networks. There is no stock in the company. There is no private ownership. There are only tokens to represent governance of the network.
This means two things, and they’re both good.
The first is that you get paid. When 100% of the revenue generated by the network goes back to the users, that means that all of the proceeds from bandwidth sales bolster the value of your rewards. When you sell bandwidth on the network, this is how you’ll get paid, and that means the revenue goes to you and your fellow users.
The second is a little more subtle, but it’s actually even more important.
When a network is owned collectively by its users, nobody makes decisions for it that run counter to their interests. We all want as many users to join the network as possible, so it keeps expanding. But none of us would benefit in any way from tricking people into becoming users. Simply put, in a network with an equitable design, their loss is not our gain. When there is no system in place that sends profits to the hands of a small number of people in charge, there is no incentive for anyone to do anything that harms the community.
https://www.getgrass.io/blog/grass-building-a-more-ethical-network
https://app.getgrass.io/register/?referralCode=3e4aV0bDMQ1klT5
