Web3 Startup The Grid Is Building Google Maps for Blockchain Data

By Luke Edwards

Newly unveiled The Grid is a Web3 structuring and verifying system, which could be the "map" data needed to make the blockchain world more accessible than ever before.

After working on this for seven years, The Grid is coming into the limelight as a meta standard that can help data platforms connect to the blockchain more effectively.

All that should mean a more user friendly interface that allows less Web3 savvy users to feel comfortable exploring this space and—ultimately—investing more.

Co-founder, Jonathan Knegtel, told Decrypt: "Think of this as an evolution rather than a revolution. The Grid provides ecosystem metadata.

"Currently you arrive in the Web3 city and its logos and lights are everywhere, but little else. The Grid will pull in more information on those offerings. A bit like how Google Maps gives you information about the services populated there, rather than just a name."

The current ecosystem is a bit like Google Maps with names that offer little else—leaving you no idea how to tell a coffee shop from a hospital. The Grid aims to bring that into a more informative system.

The Grid's first partner has been Solana, meaning that it has indexed its projects and metadata. It aims to be integrated on a larger scale, but the other 60 specific Web3 partner companies have not yet been announced.

It's been enough, though, to garner interest from platforms beyond Solana as the potential has been recognized. Following an initial angel funding round that reached €600,000, this represents a crucial point in standardization for the Web3 ecosystem.

So what makes The Grid stand out? It pulls information from these websites and offers that data for front end ecosystems. Knegtel readily admits that this is something many LLMs could do.

"What makes The Grid different is that we use the Four Eyes principle. That means there is the use of LLMs in the honestly unsexy work of data cleaning. But we also have human eyes to check and confirm what's brought back. The result is a far higher quality data set," he said. "In an age where there is more and more untrustworthy AI information, what The Grid offers is a premium service which delivers reliability."

The Grid is designed to meet systems at their points of need. That means current block explorers, wallets and exchanges can leverage the data to pull in clear descriptions of what products and services do. This is why Knegtel said The Grid doesn't need to compete, but rather helps augment, what's already there. In fact it can work both ways to help.

"We've actually had blockchain requests on how to best work towards standardization," said Knegtel. "We are able to offer guidance that can lead to blockchain level recognition—to work with ecosystems where they may have previously struggled to get noticed."

While The Grid has started work with Solana, it is also offering its explorer and open source reference implementation.

The open core model and GraphQL API allow platforms to build their own ecosystem pages using that data set from The Grid. This gives firms the power to update and control how data is managed across its ecosystem.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.

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