It blew up starting with the GRASS Season 1 air drop, and it fizzled out when the GRASS Season 2 air drop ended.
As the saying goes, GRASS makes you succeed, GRASS also makes you fail.
Personally, I think for the Depin project, small individual investors have no chance of participating.
Why? Can you come and go through the details and analyze it? 🧐
First of all, what is a Depin project? DepIN stands for Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks, or decentralized physical infrastructure networks. In plain language, it uses individuals' storage and network bandwidth resources to decentralize and provide services for needs like AI computing power, and encourages users to contribute through token incentive mechanisms.
Origin: I personally got in touch with Depin projects in 2021. Back then there was a project called CCN (later renamed OORT). When I first entered the crypto space, the so-called “grouping” of personal storage and bandwidth resources to provide solutions for AI compute demand was basically the idea that got sold to me. I thought it was amazing, with lots of opportunities and a promising future. I bought 2,000 tokens at 0.8U per unit in the primary market, with linear unlocking. Anyway, I lost money—now the token price is 0.005U.
Hope won’t die. Depin hype explodes: even though I got scammed by OORT, I still believed in the concept of Depin back in 2024. Then in 2024 I ran into GRASS—if I remember right, it was the S1 airdrop around October. I was also just idling and running GRASS nodes; one account had a few dozen to a hundred coins. The price was also pretty good then.
Grass’s explosive popularity drove a frenzy across the entire Depin sector. Projects like DAWN, Gradient, Nodepay, BlockMesh, and others were instantly hyped by everyone—buying nodes and running multiple instances and挂机 bots. It even became the fashionable way to chase “airdrop money” back then, like a Telegram mini-game.
When the tide goes out, everyone is swimming naked: besides a small profit I made from Nodepay’s airdrop in January 2025, DAWN still hasn’t shown up. Gradient lured quite a few people into buying static IPs with the very high node requirements at the time (later they switched tracks, so there probably isn’t a chance to get that money back). As for later launches like Naoris, Bless Network, openledger, and others—either they don’t distribute, or they do the classic “rug” after. Most Depin projects are basically dead, but some people still cling to fantasies. They keep hanging on anyway—maybe there will be rewards.
Official verdict at last: In July 2026, GRASS’s second-quarter airdrop will open for lookup. Dozens of U are big payouts—basically all under 1U. It’s a complete verdict: no more operating, no more just挂机 to claim airdrops—the death of Depin projects.
Why is the Depin airdrop dead?
First, the head-effect.
After the Depin track went through waves of shuffling, GRASS has already firmly secured the top position. Later entrants are hard to shake it. For retail investors to participate in other projects, it’s also hard to get good returns.
Second, the imbalance between project revenue and airdrop spending.
Let’s just use Grass as the example. It currently makes roughly 20–30 million USD in revenue per year. And the token can’t possibly be chased with hot money the way it was during the TGE. But the nodes might still be in the range of a few million. Compared this way, doesn’t an airdrop of less than 1U per person sound plausible?
Third, the cold-start phase is already over, and retail investors get used, then discarded.
The Depin projects that can succeed have already succeeded. Those that can’t succeed don’t really have much chance anymore. The biggest role retail investors play is during cold start—everyone contributes resources to boost the project. But now that the project has “crossed the river,” backstabbing like this is also a common play!