GRAPE AI
You pay for AI. Now make your attention pay you back every time. ⚡
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About
GRAPE AI is an AI Extension that creates a new economic loop between advertisers, developers, and AI compute. Today, developers spend money to access AI, while brands spend money to capture developer attention. GRAPE connects these two economies: advertisers fund campaigns, developers earn credits by engaging with relevant ads, and those credits pay for the AI compute developers already use. GRAPE uses The Graph Protocol to understand a user’s onchain activity and build detailed personas, allowing advertisers to target highly relevant audiences based on roles, regions, protocols, and real-time blockchain behavior. Campaign budgets are secured through smart contracts, with transparent spending and performance analytics. For developers, GRAPE integrates contextual ads directly into the AI workflow rather than interrupting it. When developers use GRAPE’s AI models, relevant ads generate regenerative credits, with developers earning up to 70%+ of ad spend toward future AI queries. The platform runs AI inference on its own compute infrastructure, turning developer attention into a mechanism for continuously funding AI usage. GRAPE also extends beyond human users. AI agents can interact with GRAPE programmatically through an extension and use the x402 protocol for pay-per-request micropayments on Hedera, receiving structured, onchain data without traditional API integrations. Extension link: https://open-vsx.org/extension/GrapeTools/grape-ai https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GrapeTools.grape-ai&ssr=false#review-details
How it's made
GRAPE AI is a developer AI assistant with a credit-based economy, combining AI inference, onchain intelligence, and blockchain-based payments. The extension is already live for VS Code and Cursor, so developers can install it and experience the full loop themselves. The client integrates with developer workflows, while our backend handles AI inference, campaign management, ad selection, credit accounting, and analytics. AI inference runs on our AWS EC2 infrastructure, where developer credits are consumed based on AI usage. Developers receive an initial credit grant and earn additional credits when qualified sponsored ads are served alongside their AI responses. Advertiser spend funds these rewards, creating a regenerative loop where developer attention helps pay for future AI compute. For onchain intelligence, we use The Graph Protocol (https://thegraph.com/) to analyze wallet activity and generate developer personas from live blockchain data. GRAPE uses Subgraphs, Token API, and Substreams across Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Base to identify activities such as DeFi usage, trading, NFT ownership, and smart-contract development. The same infrastructure allows the AI to query live onchain data and generate responses from current blockchain activity. Hedera provides the financial settlement layer. Advertisers fund campaigns using HTS USDC, with smart contracts managing campaign budgets, settlement, and developer withdrawals. CampaignVault handles campaign funds and settlement, while RewardPool enables controlled and replay-protected reward withdrawals. The deployed contracts can be verified here: https://hashscan.io/testnet/contract/0.0.10502346 For autonomous AI agents, GRAPE implements the x402 payment protocol on Hedera. Agents can discover pricing, receive a 402 Payment Required, pay per inference request in native HBAR through the Blocky402 facilitator (https://blocky402.com/), and receive the AI response without an API key or subscription. Together, Grape provide AI models, The Graph provides onchain intelligence, and Hedera provides transparent payments and settlement—connecting AI usage, developer attention, and blockchain economics into one regenerative loop.