Solana wallets buckle as 2.8M addresses angle for Grass airdrop

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The decentralized AI training network Grass went live with its airdrop this morning, and the GRASS token distribution brought Solana wallets to heel. 

Grass’ creators claim to be carrying out one of the most widely-distributed airdrops in history, and the token has been heavily farmed because participating required no financial stake from users. The popular Solana wallet Phantom saw its backend go down six minutes after the GRASS airdrop went live, and Backpack CEO alluded to difficulty with the wallet stemming from the claim. Solflare CEO Vidor Gencel said the wallet saw “minor degradation and automatically scaled up.”

“We’re currently aware of some issues affecting users on Jup.ag, when using 3rd party wallets,” the popular Solana swap platform Jupiter wrote on X. 

At first glance, Phantom and others’ struggles might seem related to the RPC protocols that allow crypto programs to interact. But at least two Solana’s RPCs seemed to weather the storm.

Mert Mumtaz, CEO of the popular Solana RPC platform Helius, said the company’s RPCs are “fine,” and Phantom’s downtime appeared to be stemming from elsewhere. Brian Long, co-founder of Solana RPC service Triton One, told me its RPCs “took a hit during the event and recovered quickly thereafter.”

Grass — the token and the network — live on Solana. The Solana network itself did not appear to experience degraded performance during the airdrop. SOL itself still fell slightly on the airdrop news, from $177 to $175.

Users had trouble claiming the GRASS airdrop at first as wallet providers struggled to keep up with the surge in usage. Markets on centralized exchanges responded well to this fact, sending the token price up to $1.00 on KuCoin before dropping precipitously throughout the morning.

With 100 million tokens being distributed, the airdrop still amounted to tens of millions of dollars-worth in new tokens.

GRASS is meant to power the Grass network, which is being developed by Wynd Labs. Grass rewards users for sharing their unused internet bandwidth, which the protocol uses to scrape web data. Large datasets of this kind are useful for developing AI models, which are trained on data scraped from the web. Wynd’s leaders argue that Grass’ network accumulates better data than large-scale web scrapers, which may be blocked or run into falsified data.

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

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