TL;DR: We have committed to have a lot of useful data, properly licensed, for you to to use without fees as part of our open core business model. Check it out and build something cool.

Why The Grid is Going Open:

The Grid's announcement today of our Open Data service is both a big step for The Grid in our mission to connect Web3 businesses to each other and the world, it also means a lot to me personally.

The Long Road to Open Data

When the free software / open source software movement started, it proved something radical: that giving away your work could actually create more value than hoarding it. For me, this also represents a personal story — I spent the first half of my career working on open licensing. During this time, I helped establish the Open Data Commons project and served on the board of the Open Knowledge Foundation, all the while trying to answer a deceptively simple question: if open source works for code, why not for data (and all knowledge)?

The answer, it turns out, gets complicated. Data isn't code. The legal frameworks are messier. The incentives differ. But the core principle remains: when you make foundational infrastructure open, everyone builds better.

Why Web3 Needs Open Ecosystem Data

Here's the problem we keep seeing: Web3 values openness and transparency, but the ecosystem intelligence layer — who's building what, where teams work actively, how ecosystems connect — sits locked up in inside organisations, updated (if at all) manually, and just generally very inefficient for everyone.

Want to know which projects build on a particular L1 or L2? You'll spend 40+ hours cobbling together data from X, Discord, GitHub, and a dozen other sources. Want to create a market map of the DeFi ecosystem? Good luck keeping it accurate for more than a week, and sourcing all the up-to-date logos and resizing them will take up way more time than you think (or could every want to spend).

This represents exactly the kind of foundational data that should exist openly. Not because it sounds nice to have, but because making it open creates a flywheel that benefits everyone — including us.

And on a personal level, it is exactly the kind of messy problem that causes a lot of wasted time across every org in Web3 that Jonathan and I like to dig in and try to solve.

Introducing The Grid's Open Data Service

Today, we make a substantial portion of The Grid's ecosystem data available under the Open Database License (ODbL). This matches the same "share-alike" license that powers OpenStreetMap and other critical open data infrastructure.

What's included:

• Core company and project information across our dataset (2800+ projects and counting)

• Access through our GraphQL API

• See more at Open Data

What this means for you:

• Build market maps without manual research

• Create ecosystem visualizations that stay current

• Integrate Web3 ecosystem intelligence into your tools

• Share and remix the data freely (with attribution)

• Vibe code cool stuff

How It Works

We've marked every field in our schema with its licensing status. Look for "Open Data (ODbL)" in the data_license field, and you'll know exactly what you can use.

The requirements stay simple: attribute The Grid, share your improvements back to the community, and keep building.

You can see the full details on our new Open Data page and Attribution Guidelines.

Why This Matters

Open data doesn't represent charity. It constitutes infrastructure.

When you make foundational data open, you enable things you never imagined. Someone will build a tool we would never have thought of. Someone will spot an error we missed. Someone will combine our data with theirs and create something genuinely new.

And here's the part that makes this sustainable: when people claim and update their profiles in the network portal, everyone benefits. When projects use our API to power their services, they gain incentives to keep the data accurate. The more the data gets used, the better it becomes.

What's Not Included (And Why)

We don't open-source everything. The Grid Schema (TGS) as a whole, our commercial features, and third-party data we license remain proprietary. This doesn't mean giving away the entire business — it means making the core ecosystem data accessible while building sustainable commercial services on top.

The Bigger Picture

Twenty-five years ago, people thought open source represented naive idealism. Today, it powers the internet.

When I helped co-create the Open Data Commons project, and its licenses, I had no idea where it would go, and it's led me to co-founding The Grid and to our launch of our open data today.

Web3 - specifically network ledgers / distributed ledger technology - enables open and transparent financial infrastructure. But we still need to figure out how to grow and build a community of users of this new infrastructure, and to do that we need open and accessible infrastructure so that the builders can focus on building great products instead of reinventing the wheel each time they need basic information in their UX, their products, or their business processes.

This represents our contribution to that effort. Not the only approach, not the complete solution, but a meaningful step toward making Web3 ecosystem data a public good.

This won't be our only contribution either - long term we want to create more open standards and open source tooling for business information - we call this project the Web3DA (more on this as we grow).

If you build tools, create visualisations, or just want to understand Web3 ecosystems better, the data exists there. Use it. Improve it. Share it back.

That's how infrastructure gets built.

—Jordan

Ready to explore The Grid's open data?

• Read the full Open Data documentation

• Check out the Attribution Guidelines

• Questions? Contact us.

• Claim your Profile