GRASS Inflation Analysis · September 2026 · Supply growing, projected to keep growing
Grass creates no new GRASS at all — the whole 1,000M supply was minted at the October 2024 launch and the chain reports 999,993,103.21 in existence today, below where it started — and yet the Pressure Framework reads GRASS at +9.53% over the trailing 90 days and +7.56% over the next 90. Every point of that comes from one mechanism: twelve Solana lock vaults holding the Foundation, contributor and early-investor allocations, which released 51.2M GRASS into the market over the window alongside a single 13.3M discretionary grant. Sell pressure is 64.5M GRASS, buy pressure is 0, and the ceiling is a hard 1,000M GRASS that has never been exceeded.
The verdict, in one paragraph
Against a circulating base of 677.0M GRASS, the framework books 64.5M GRASS of sell pressure and 0 of buy pressure over the trailing 90 days — a net of +9.53% — and projects +7.56% for the next 90 days on the same monthly rails. The inflation monitor reads +11.41% for the same window, a gap of 1.88 percentage points, which is over the framework's 0.5pp tolerance and therefore ships with a monitor-gap warning on the overview page. That gap decomposes cleanly: 1.09pp is base convention, because the monitor divides its supply change by the 90-day-old supply while the framework divides by today's, and the remaining 0.79pp is the difference between what the published unlock calendars bill and what the vaults actually paid out. The label for GRASS is a capped token whose lock-up is still unwinding: the supply cannot inflate, but the tradable float can, and right now it does.
Sell pressure: where new GRASS comes from
It does not come from minting. Grass has no block reward, no staking emission and no fee-funded mint: the entire 1,000,000,000 GRASS was created at the Grass launch in October 2024, and the token's own supply field read 999,993,103.21 on three separate reads this session — a number that is below genesis, which caps every GRASS ever destroyed over the token's whole life at 6,897. Network participant rewards, including the Stage 2 distribution whose claims opened in July 2026, are paid in dollars out of Grass revenue rather than in new tokens; the Grass Foundation's own recap of its Jul 7 2026 holder call states the distribution leaves the circulating supply of GRASS completely unaltered. So Sell #1, protocol inflation, is 0. It is tagged as watched rather than closed for one reason that matters: the GRASS mint authority is not renounced. The freeze authority is null, but the mint key is still assigned to a live signer — the same signer that controls the Grass Foundation treasury — so the ability to create more GRASS exists even though it has never been used.
The supply story is Sell #2, vesting unlocks, at 51.2M GRASS. Grass's unreleased allocations sit in twelve multisig lock vaults on Solana, and the framework read every one of them at both ends of the window rather than trusting a calendar. Three identical vaults pay out exactly 1,948,333.33 GRASS each on the 28th of every month; they fired on Jun 28 2026, Jul 28 2026 and Aug 29 2026, taking each vault from 17,535,000 to 11,690,000, with six payments still to run. The Grass Foundation treasury separately funds a payout wallet with exactly 4,838,295.42 GRASS a month, on Jun 23 2026, Jul 27 2026 and Aug 24 2026. And five early-investor vaults, each holding exactly 10M GRASS when the window opened, emptied part of their balance in a single cluster immediately after the Jun 28 2026 unlock date. No GRASS is created by any of this: the coins already existed and were already inside the 1,000M ceiling. What changes is that they stop being locked and become tradable float — which is exactly what the Pressure Framework measures, and exactly what a hard cap does not protect a holder from.
Sell #3, Foundation and unscheduled unlocks, is 13.3M GRASS. On Jun 10 2026 the Grass Foundation treasury executed a single multisig transfer of 13,333,332.33 GRASS to a fresh one-signature wallet that has not moved a coin since. It is on no published calendar, it is the only such event in the window, and it is booked once, at the moment it left team control — the same measurement point used for the vault rails. Nothing is projected forward from it, because one firing in 90 days with no fixed date is not a cadence. Sell #4, long-term locked or bankruptcy, is 0: GRASS has no bankruptcy estate, no trustee and no court-ordered distribution attached to it.
Buy pressure: where new GRASS goes
Nowhere, this window. Buy #1, programmatic buyback, is 0, and this row is the one worth explaining, because a buyback was publicly described. Coverage of the Jul 7 2026 Grass holder call reports a hand-run repurchase of $10,000 of GRASS one week and $25,000 the next — roughly 5% of half a year's revenue, and characterised on the call itself as a posture rather than a fiscal manoeuvre. There is no buyback contract, no published dashboard, no rule fixing the size, no disclosed destination wallet, and the Grass Foundation's own written recap of that same call carries no buyback commitment. On the chain, the Grass treasury took in no GRASS from the open market across the entire window; its only inflow was 1,799,999 GRASS on Aug 21 2026, executed by the treasury multisig itself from a wallet it already controls, with no dollar leg. A single unverifiable source and no on-chain trace is not enough to size a row, so the row ships at zero and the claim is re-checked at every rebuild.
Buy #2, protocol fee burn, is 0, and it was verified on both surfaces a token can be destroyed through. The two unspendable addresses on Solana hold 0.000000001 GRASS each — a single billionth of one token between them, unmoved. The GRASS supply field reads 999,993,103.21 against a 1,000,000,000 genesis, which bounds all destruction ever, not just in this window, at 6,897 GRASS. The two surfaces are genuinely independent — a burn instruction cuts the supply field without touching a dead address, and a transfer to the incinerator raises the dead address without cutting supply — and both read effectively zero, so this is a verified zero rather than an opacity. Structurally there is nothing to burn with: Grass sells bandwidth and web data to AI buyers for dollars, the revenue arrives in dollars, and the Jul 7 2026 governance decision on revenue capture routed that revenue to participants as dollars rather than into a token bid.
Buy #3, Foundation buy, is 0 — the Grass treasury moved in one direction across the window, from 282.5M down to 256.5M GRASS. Buy #4, new long-term lock, is 0, and GRASS staking moved the other way: the eighteen Grass staking pools held 245.1M GRASS at the start of the window and 212.7M at the end, a 32.4M net unstake. Even a large inflow would not have counted here, because staked GRASS already sits inside the circulating float and can be withdrawn after a short cooldown — staking on Grass defers a sale, it does not remove supply.
Foundation and overhang
The overhang on GRASS is very large and fully enumerated: 343.3M GRASS, just over a third of the entire ceiling, sits in identified team-controlled hands. The dominant item is the Grass Foundation treasury multisig at 256.5M GRASS — controlled by the same key that holds the GRASS mint authority, which is worth stating plainly, because the treasury key and the money-printing key are one key. Next are the three monthly lock vaults at 11.69M each, or 35.1M combined, with six scheduled payments left. Then five early-investor vaults holding 34.7M GRASS between them, whose vesting is documented to complete in late October 2026. Last is the 13.3M GRASS parked in the wallet that received the Jun 10 2026 grant, which has never sent a coin and sits one signature from the market. All four are read from the chain at every rebuild.
Two of these are calendars and two are decisions, and the difference matters. The vault rails are already written: they pay a fixed quantum on a fixed date and nobody re-decides them each month. The Grass Foundation treasury is the opposite — 256.5M GRASS with a spender rather than a schedule, and the Jun 10 2026 grant is the proof that it does move outside any published calendar. The trigger sentence applies to all four: if the Grass treasury's balance, either vault group's balance, or the grant wallet's balance falls between refreshes by more than the schedule accounts for, that outflow enters Sell #3 at the next refresh.
How GRASS compares to other capped, non-minting DePIN tokens
GRASS belongs to the class of DePIN tokens that launched their entire supply at once and then spent years handing it out. That is a different economic animal from a chain that mints. A halving-model chain like Bitcoin still creates coins on every block, at a decaying rate on a known clock, so its inflation reading is positive but shrinking. Grass creates nothing — the GRASS supply field has never risen above its genesis number. On the pure issuance axis, GRASS is stricter than any proof-of-work chain and stricter than every uncapped continuous-emission Layer 1, where a staking-linked emission of 5% to 15% a year is normal.
And yet GRASS reads +9.53% while a mid-cycle Bitcoin reads a fraction of a percent, and that is the whole lesson: a hard cap constrains total supply, not tradable float, and the two move independently. GRASS is far closer in shape to a recently-launched token working through a multi-year investor and contributor vest than to a mature capped chain. Compared with its DePIN peers — the bandwidth, storage and compute networks that share the same launch-and-distribute model — GRASS is unusual in two ways. Its unlock is cliff-based on the 28th rather than smoothly continuous, so there are dated events to trade around. And the largest single overhang is not a vesting cohort at all but a discretionary Foundation treasury, which is why the framework treats its balance as a watched number rather than a solved one.
The sharper comparison is to the exchange tokens and perp venues that run buybacks and burns. Those offset issuance with a demand-linked removal that scales with usage, and their inflation readings can go genuinely negative. Grass has real revenue — the Jul 7 2026 holder call put full-year 2026 training-data revenue at $65-75M — but that revenue is taken in dollars and returned to participants in dollars. For the buy side to matter to this reading, Grass would need to spend on the order of $21M a quarter repurchasing GRASS, against a programme currently measured in tens of thousands of dollars a week. That is the distance between a buyback existing and a buyback mattering.
What to watch in the next 90 days
First, the monthly vault release on Sep 28 2026 and again on Oct 28 2026 and Nov 28 2026: three vaults paying 1,948,333.33 GRASS each plus the treasury's 4,838,295.42 monthly funding, roughly 10.7M GRASS a month, and the single biggest driver of the next reading. Second, the early-investor tranche, documented to finish unlocking in late October 2026, which would put the remaining 34.7M GRASS into the float inside this window and is the main reason the forward number could land above +7.56% rather than below it. Third, the Grass Foundation treasury at 256.5M GRASS — the only pot on this token with a spender rather than a schedule, and the source of the Jun 10 2026 grant; any further ad-hoc transfer enters Sell #3 immediately. Fourth, the buyback: if Grass publishes a repurchase wallet or moves the programme from manual to automatic execution, Buy #1 becomes measurable for the first time and this page's only zero-buy row could open. Fifth, the GRASS mint authority, still assigned rather than renounced — renouncing it would be the single cleanest supply commitment Grass could make, and it has not been made.
Summary
The MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads GRASS at +9.53% over the trailing 90 days and +7.56% projected forward: supply growing, projected to keep growing. The structural mechanism is not inflation but unlock — Grass mints nothing, burned nothing, and holds a fixed ceiling of 1,000M GRASS that has never been exceeded, while twelve Solana lock vaults released 51.2M GRASS into the market over the window and a further 13.3M left the treasury on a single day. The key risk is that most of this is mechanical: the vault rails pay a fixed quantum on the 28th regardless of price, and the buy side that could offset them produced exactly zero — no burn, no on-chain buyback, and revenue that is collected and returned in dollars rather than in GRASS. The comfort is smaller than it looks: the cap is real, but 343.3M GRASS is still in identified team-controlled hands, and the mint authority that could raise the cap has never been renounced.
MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of GRASS, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Updated Sep 7 2026.