Following the release of the second stage of the award, the community's discontent rose again. The award for project-directed participants was close to $3 million, but the introduction of USDC, rather than the original currency, GRASS, also shifted the focus of the debate from the amount of the award to whether there was a clear use of the token itself.
Second-stage awards to USDC
The Grass Foundation has opened a second-stage incentive query. The participants had previously expanded by running browsers, shared idle bandwidth, supported the agreement to sell web-crawling data to AI laboratories and obtained points on that basis.
The second phase covered the period from October 2024 to June 2026. According to the estimates, the current round was just under $3 million, and the award was USDC.
Many participants expressed disappointment with the distribution results. There were numerous complaints on social platforms and some users said that applications would be deleted or unloaded. This is not the first time that Grass has faced a community rebound because of the issue of rewards. Similar criticisms of the distribution were made by participants during the GASS tokens generation event in 2024.
The use of the GRASS token is again questioned
The controversy is not just about the size of the reward. The bigger difference is that Grass does not provide incentives in original currency, as most DePIN projects do, but uses USDC directly.
Grass co-founder Andrej Radonjic stated that the agreement could be paid with USDC because the project had already been profitable and could be settled directly from network income to the contributor. Proponents believe that this approach has helped to reduce the potential push of GRASS.
However, the opposing party took the opposite view. As the GRASS no longer assumed the incentive function of participation, the market began to ask what role the token could play. It was mentioned that, although Grass ' s revenue data had allegedly been verified by Messari and EV3 Ventures under conditions of confidentiality, the project had not yet published a clearer value return mechanism. Of the known arrangements, only $350,000 was repurchased in December 2025.
On July 7th, the phone will be focused.
While the dispute continued, Glass planned a telephone conference for the holders on 7 July. Proponents and challengers are waiting for the projecters to explain two core issues: the growth of network revenues and the way in which the functions and values of the subsequent GRASS follow.
The report cites market estimates that, based on recent growth and past quarterly data, the annualized income of Grass could reach between $50 million and $100 million. This is also why community expectations for telephone conferences have risen significantly and it is hoped that the project will further explain the relationship between income and currency.
Recent discussions around “equity and tokens” are also on the rise. The article mentions that after the announcement this week of the completion of the $65 million A round of Dragonfly-sponsored financing by Venice, the market again discussed whether project financing would weaken the interests of token holders. Grass is also looking at the current controversy in this larger context.