Blockworks

Grass, the Solana DePIN project, is raising $10 million in a bridge raise, Blockworks has exclusively learned.&nbsp;



The project previously raised both a seed and a <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/grass-data-verification-depin-funding">Series A round</a>.&nbsp;



The decentralized AI project which allows folks to sell access to idle internet bandwidth — essentially giving you more power to hand over your data rather than having a large company scrape it for profit.&nbsp;



Polychain and Tribe Capital participated in the bridge round, which is primarily a token purchase, Grass’s Andrej Radonjic told Blockworks.



“Grass is a piece of technology that allows companies to access data at an unprecedented scale,” Radonjic said when asked why Grass was interested in a token purchase.&nbsp;



“The possibilities are kind of endless in terms of the directions that you&#8217;re able to go. And there are multiple things that we think are vital to build on top of this, namely live context retrieval.”



He further explained that, at this moment, the way AI companies are training their models is to scrape search engines such as Google. However, they can’t deploy internet-scale web crawls because they’re being blocked, but Grass offers a solution.&nbsp;



Grass wasn’t necessarily actively looking to raise at the moment, Radonjic said, but it happened at the right time for the team.&nbsp;



“I was mentioning that commercially, things are going really well, and…we&#8217;re seeing amazing growth in terms of selling training data to AI companies that are looking to train things like video models and text to speech models,” he said.&nbsp;



“But I had mentioned that one of the things that we&#8217;re looking forward to over the next year to two years…[is actually] having Grass become infrastructure for not just training data, but also inference data.”



There’ll be a shift from compute cycles on training to inference, and the Grass team wants to get ahead of it. The end goal will be to do an “inner scale web crawl,” which would allow them to build out the live context retrieval.&nbsp;



“Rarely have we come across a team executing as ferociously as the Grass team does. They are an archetypical example of how businesses built on distributed systems can outcompete web2 peers,” Polychain’s Josh Rosenthal told Blockworks in a statement.&nbsp;



“After leading their Seed round, participating in their Series A, and now leading this round, this is the third time Polychain Capital has backed Grass…We’re thrilled to triple down on Grass at such a meaningful inflection point of their journey as a leading data and AI business.”



In a cycle that’s hyper-focused on crypto use cases, Grass is offering a more crypto native use case than, say, stablecoins. But it’s also operating in a space — AI — that’s just as lucrative as it is competitive.



&#8220;Since we invested in 2023, Grass has served as a benchmark for how we want our portfolio companies to operate — a diabolical focus on product and revenue,” Boris Revsin, CEO and Managing Director of Tribe Capital, told Blockworks.&nbsp;



“Grass is a product leader and we have seen major 7-figure clients, including the largest AI labs, sign up in the last 12 months. That’s what matters. Everything else follows.”&nbsp;



In the last 30 days, Grass has had 8.5 million monthly active users and is currently working with around 20 companies, as well as with nonprofits and universities.&nbsp;



The structuring of the round was never really “a question,” Radonjic explained.&nbsp;



“The Grass Foundation…faces all of our customers contractually. And all the revenue that these customers are paying is going straight into the Grass Foundation&#8217;s bank account…The GRASS token is the primary vehicle for value accrual for everything that we&#8217;re doing.”



This is a developing story.



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This article was generated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by editor&nbsp;<a href="mailto:jeffrey@blockworks.co" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Jeffrey Albus</a>&nbsp;before publication.



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DePIN

DePIN Grass raises $10M from Polychain, Tribe Capital

Sam Reynolds

<div id="highlights-block_6143580ac52c3" class="highlights">
 <ul>
 <li>Round was led by Three Arrows Capital and Polychain with participation from R/Crypto Fund, Dragonfly, CMS Holdings, Collab+Currency and Lvna Capital</li>
 <li>Avalanche said the proceeds will go to fueling the growth of its on-chain DeFi ecosystem, NFTs, as well as some new asset types</li>
 </ul>
 
</div>



Layer-1 protocol Avalanche announced today that it had closed a $230 million token sale in June with participation from some of the best known investors in the token space.&nbsp;



According to a release put out by the Avalanche Foundation, the round was led by Singapore’s Three Arrows Capital, Polychain, and included participation from R/Crypto Fund, Dragonfly, CMS Holdings, Collab+Currency, Lvna Capital as well as an unnamed group of angel investors.



The Avalanche Foundation says that it will use the proceeds to accelerate the rapid growth of DeFi, NFTs, and other new asset classes on the Avalanche blockchain.&nbsp;



Speaking at Blockworks’ recent Digital Asset Summit in New York, Ava Labs, the development house behind Avalanche, president John Wu, <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/das-2021-ava-labs-wu-says-economies-will-depend-on-next-gen-layer-1s/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">said that</a> layer-1 protocols like Avalanche will be where the crypto economy will be.



“You can have internet of value, you can have ecosystems, but you don’t have an economy unless transactions are easily done and affordably done,” Wu said at DAS.



Wu believes that the layer-1 ecosystem will be a ‘winner-take-most’ network, where the market rewards the platform that can quickly and efficiently solve Ethereum’s pain points.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“In the crypto, DeFi world, stickiness for users is an issue…so the competitive advantage for a protocol is going to be how fast can they innovate and how fast their business development team can get the best developers and best projects and decentralized apps onto their chain,” Wu said.</blockquote>



In order to help generate this competitive advantage, Avalanche recently unveiled a $180 million liquidity mining incentive — a form of yield farming where DeFi traders earn an additional token on top of the expected yield — to bring projects over to its protocol.



“Avalanche has quickly turned promise and potential into real-world impact and value creation for DeFi users and developers,” said Emin Gün Sirer, director at the Avalanche Foundation, in a press release. “The community of builders rallying around the network is a testament to its competitive edge, and there is still so much potential yet to be tapped at the intersection of institutional and decentralized finance on Avalanche.”



AVAX, the eponymous token behind the Avalanche protocol, is up 21% today to $64 on the news, according to <a href="https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/avalanche" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">CoinGecko</a>. It’s currently the twelfth largest digital asset with a market cap of $14 billion. In comparison, Solana, one of Avalanche’s competitors, has a market cap of just over $46 billion and trades at $154, but is down 18% on-week given the protocol’s<a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/sol-stumbles-as-solana-struggles-with-technical-issues/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> technical troubles</a>. 



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