Grass Redefines Internet Incentives, Ushering in a New Era of Ethical Data Sharing for AI Development

Grass, the company redefining Internet incentive structures, is empowering individuals to turn their unused internet bandwidth into real value. For years, companies have secretly profited from people’s internet bandwidth without their knowledge, turning this hidden resource into billions in revenue. Grass is changing that. By giving users control over their bandwidth and making participation transparent, Grass ensures people are fairly rewarded while providing businesses with an ethical way to access the data they need to power AI and deliver online services people rely on.

Big companies need to understand how the information on the web appears across different regions to test localized ads, compare products, price match, track real-time weather patterns, train AI models and so much more. However, enterprise internet connections are linked to data-center IP addresses, locking their view of the internet to a single location and making their online activity easy to track, manipulate and block. To solve this, companies must use residential proxy networks—pools of regular home internet connections that make their activity indistinguishable from everyday internet users.

Also Read: AI and Big Data Governance: Challenges and Top Benefits

Currently, the residential proxy industry exploits people by covertly siphoning their internet bandwidth through free apps, VPNs, and services on their phones, smart TVs, and laptops by burying permissions in the t*******************. Intermediaries profit in the tens of billions of dollars by selling this resource without transparency, consent, or fair compensation. This system forces businesses into an unethical structure where they unknowingly contribute to the exploitation of everyday users.

Grass flips these practices on their head by fairly rewarding people who opt into sharing their unused internet bandwidth. Through the Grass app, users can safely contribute their bandwidth and receive equitable rewards, eliminating the exploitative practices of traditional proxy networks. This allows companies to conduct their online operations ethically, cost-effectively, and without performance tradeoffs, benefiting both individuals and businesses.

Sharing bandwidth with Grass is safe and secure. When companies use the network to route requests through a user’s internet connection, they are simply utilizing a tiny fraction of the user’s available bandwidth—like someone connecting to their friend’s home Wi-Fi on their own device, except with Grass, users get rewarded for sharing.

Grass rewards people with a stake in the network they help create by distributing equitable allocations of Grass Tokens. Since the Grass app has been live, Grass has delivered 100 million Grass Tokens to more than 2 million Grass users.

“Historically, your internet bandwidth has been stolen from you by companies that pay developers to sneak software into your free apps. They then turn around and allow companies to use your device to scrape valuable web data. Grass lets internet users benefit from something they never knew they were giving away: their unused internet bandwidth,” said Andrej Radonjic, co-founder of Wynd Labs, a core contributor to the Grass network.

Beyond ethical proxy services, Grass plays a critical role in the future of AI by facilitating access to public web data. The demand for multimodal data—especially video—has surged as AI advances into generative models, autonomous systems, and robotics. These systems rely on petabytes of high-quality multimodal data to function effectively. Yet, acquiring this data at the necessary scale remains a challenge. Big tech firms solve this problem by using their content platforms to obtain this data without compensating users, but other AI labs need a way to access web data without directly funding their largest competitors. This is what Grass has decided to tackle first. By leveraging its decentralized network, Grass ensures there is a way for those who contribute to AI’s advancement to be directly rewarded rather than passive sources of extracted value.

With over 3 million nodes, Grass scrapes more than 1 petabyte of public web data daily—more multi-modal data than a human brain will process in four decades. Their ongoing Sion upgrade will further expand this capacity, increasing network bandwidth to more than 1 terabit per second, allowing for multi-petabyte scale multimodal data scraping daily. By creating alternative tools that allow public web data to be accessible at scale, Grass ensures there will always be a source of data free from bias that is focused on promoting the exchange of ideas.

Grass empowers users to take control of their internet bandwidth, making it easier than ever for people to benefit from the internet’s future by simply being online.

Also Read: The Role of AI and Machine Learning in Streaming Technology

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