Contents
The story so far…
If you’re just joining us, here are a few posts we’ve made in the past to get you caught up to speed on our mission here:
Grass 101: What Grass is
Grass 102: On safety and privacy
Enter The Data Wars: What’s going on with AI in our world today, and how Grass fits into this narrative.
Enough about us, though. Today, we’ll talk about how this all benefits you: how you can maximize your compensation for being one of our earliest adopters and how to make the network a permanent source of passive income in your life.
The entire thing is about changing an unfair system that exploits you and your internet connection, so let’s get into the details of how Grass plans to get you paid. Shall we begin?
The Grass Rewards System
As we learned in the intro post, the point of Grass is to sell unused internet bandwidth to companies and academic institutions who need it to view the web. By logging on from a large number of locations, these organizations can obtain accurate statistics and research data that they need for their work. Big data is already a $274 Billion a year industry, and more and more of it hinges on bandwidth sold from residential IP addresses just like yours.
Until now, other people have sold this bandwidth without compensating you. Now, there is a way for you to be compensated. Every time your bandwidth is purchased by a buyer on the Grass network, you get rewarded for it. How does this work?
If you look at your dashboard, you’ll see that these rewards are measured in Grass Points. Points are paid out in direct proportion to the amount of uptime you have on the network, so as long as your computer is on and connected to the internet, you should be racking them up. You’ll also receive a 20% commission on any points accrued by people you refer, so spread that referral link at the bottom right if you get the chance. Hell, share it with this article if you want to. At this stage, you could still be earning up to 100 points an hour, plus another 20 from any of your referrals. Not bad!
So this all sounds great, but how does it translate to passive income?
How To Make Upwards of $900 Per Year
Grass points will soon be redeemable and you’ll get paid out on PayPal, in cryptocurrency, or in virtual gift cards. The question is — how much could these points actually be worth?
Well, when buyers use your bandwidth on the Grass network, they pay by the gigabyte for all the web data they access. While other proxy networks universally pay you a fraction (if anything at all) for this resource, 100% of Grass’s revenue gets redistributed to the network. So if a buyer spends $2,000 for a dataset from the web, $2,000 goes into your pockets.
What does that add up to for you?
One study of similar networks showed that buyers downloaded an average of 15GB of data per month through each proxy IP. (The average North American downloads 536 GB per month, so an extra 15 isn’t too serious for any one user.)
How much do buyers pay for this bandwidth? The price per GB will scale with the network, but let’s use $5 for this example.
15 GB/month
$5/GB
Location: US
Time Period: 5 Years
Total: $4,500
On an annual basis, this equals out to $900 per year, or $75 per month. In other words, if the network does these numbers, you could be making enough to cover your phone or internet bill every month, entirely by selling bandwidth, which requires absolutely no work.
Pretty great! Let’s take this one step farther, though…
Our Progress is Your Paycheck
You may have noticed in the previous section that we said buyers download “an average of 15GB of data per month.” If you look at that study, though, the numbers range very widely from one network to another. Here’s where it gets interesting.
Because the entire point of using residential proxies is for companies to spread out the locations from which they access web data, the amount that buyers will pay for bandwidth is proportional to how many nodes are operating on them.
Get it? The more IPs operating on Grass, the more buyers will pay for each gigabyte they use.
Here are two very important points to consider in light of that fact:
- As you use the web extension and log uptime on the network, you’re not just earning Grass points at a set value. By expanding the network, you’re making it more valuable and thus actively contributing to raising your own fees!
- When you accumulate points, you own a part of the network. As the network grows in value, you will also share in this growth.
If you’re reading this now, you are by definition one of the earliest users of this product, so you will inevitably be with us as the network gets bigger and bigger. As time goes on, you’ll see us giving updates about key statistics for measuring network growth. Keep in mind that when you see these, they are signs of success for all of us, including you.
Progress Update
So speaking of which, how is Grass doing so far?
In just over four weeks of the Grass Beta we have had,
- 190,000+ Unique IPs
- 30,000+ Downloads
- 25,000+ Referrals
One key piece of information is that American IP addresses are the most highly sought after by these companies, and recruiting more users in the United States will actually scale the value of the network more quickly. So if you’re currently living in the US, definitely download Grass today — and if you’re not, reach out to your American friends, since you can really clean up on the referral points you will accrue from their usage. Not to mention, it will also drive more traffic through the entire network, which is good for everyone.
We’ve personally been thrilled with the explosive growth over the past few weeks, and our conviction is higher than ever that Grass represents an opportunity to take this industry back from big data companies and exploitative proxy networks. Hopefully this post helped explain that our entire business model is designed so the network’s success will overwhelmingly be funnelled right back to its users, to pay them for the work they do by keeping the extension running. Happy earning!
The beta is now live, come and check it out. Follow us on Twitter and join us in the Discord for more information.
Authored by Yield Aggregator for Frogs Anon — writing for projects across DeFi