Solana Wallets Experience Issues During 2.8 Million Grass Airdrop

The decentralized AI training network Grass launched its airdrop, distributing the GRASS token and significantly impacting Solana wallets.

Grass claims to have executed one of the most widely-distributed airdrops, requiring no financial stake from users. Shortly after the airdrop commenced, the Phantom wallet experienced downtime, which Backpack CEO mentioned was related to this event. Solflare’s CEO reported minor issues that were quickly resolved.

Jupiter, a popular Solana swap platform, acknowledged user issues with third-party wallets during the airdrop. While some RPC protocols struggled, Helius's RPCs remained stable, whereas Triton One's RPCs faced temporary challenges but recovered swiftly.

The Solana network did not show signs of degraded performance during the airdrop; however, SOL's price fell slightly from $177 to $175. Users initially faced difficulties claiming the GRASS tokens due to increased demand, resulting in the token reaching $1.00 on KuCoin before declining throughout the morning.

The airdrop distributed 100 million tokens, representing tens of millions of dollars in total. The GRASS token supports the Grass network developed by Wynd Labs, which incentivizes users to share unused internet bandwidth for web data scraping. Wynd Labs asserts that this method produces higher quality data for AI model training compared to traditional web scrapers, which may encounter blocks or fake data.

Wynd Labs secured $3.5 million in seed funding led by Polychain and Tribe Capital in December 2023.