Howdy!

I’m coming to you live from a library at Oxford University. The people around me probably think I’m crafting some deep philosophical insights, but in fact I am penning tweets about cryptocurrency tokens.

Today we’ve got the GRASS airdrop, a new Solana all-time high, and daos.fun:

2.8M addresses angle for Grass airdrop

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 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.

— Jack Kubinec

Another one:

A week after smashing its previous all-time high in weekly REV (real economic value), the Solana network set a new mark for a second straight week. The blockchain’s tips and fees — which can be thought of like income — totaled some $55 million last week as AI memecoins drew masses of traders. 

The mark is quite notable, roughly doubling the highest-REV week to occur during what was already a hot summer for the network. It’ll be interesting to see if Solana can top $55 million once again this week.

— Jack Kubinec

Move it on over, memecoins. Daos.fun has dropped; a new playground that allows aspiring crypto masterminds to launch short-term funds, funneling capital into “high-risk, high-reward” plays with bonding curves and time-locked vaults. The protocol, described by X user @123skely as “Pump Fun + Friend Tech + Hyper Liquid vaults,” invites participants to make a fund, set a target (say, $10k), and get community buy-in. Once a fund hits its cap, it’s locked for three months, letting the fund manager try their best (or worst) trades with community capital. At the close, profits split 50-50 between creator and investors, or get divvied up based on DAO token shares if non-SOL tokens are involved.

The hottest launch on the platform isn't even from a human, but rather an AI-backed DAO called ai16z, modeled after Marc Andreessen. Fresh off a pseudo-endorsement from Andreessen himself, ai16z rocketed to a $100 million market cap — before swiftly correcting to around $50 million as volatility settled in. User @saori_xbt said that to their understanding, ai16z manages its own trades, learning from its community’s trading advice and adjusting trust based on members' recommendations. If a user’s suggestion generates returns, they gain more influence over future trades; flops, on the other hand, earn less say. According to the project's FAQ, the fund’s creator envisions a “marketplace of trust” where reputation dictates trading power — an experiment in decentralizing decision-making that could thrive or unravel with each trade.

Some see daos.fun as a play-by-play takedown of traditional venture capital. Project creator @baoskee pointedly declared, “VCs, I need you to understand that 15-yr-olds from developing countries will outperform your “thesis-driven” fund by 10,000%. capeesh?” Echoing the sentiment, @rashmiranjan noted, “the 15-yr-olds from developing countries will work so much harder to increase their surface area for serendipity. Outperforming the fund is bound to happen!”

For now, it appears that daos.fun has locked fund listings to specific hours. @baoskee says they are determined to focus on security, pausing expansion until the team has “a full-time monitoring stack.” Security first, fun second — not a bad way to go.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Andrej Radonjic, CEO of Wynd Labs: