The Graph (GRT)

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Basics

"The Graph establishes a mechanism for querying blockchain data on a decentralized network, starting with Ethereum. With the Graph, dApp teams are no longer required to run and operate centralized servers for data queries and instead can use trustless public infrastructure to easily access and query blockchain-specific data."

  • From its blog (24-9-2020):

"Anyone can build and publish subgraphs, which are open APIs that applications can query with GraphQL. Subgraphs make it easy for developers to build on blockchains. What Google does for search, The Graph does for blockchains.

The Graph’s mission is not to run a hosted service in perpetuity but to eliminate the possibility for APIs, servers and databases becoming single points of failure and control. This is why we’re building The Graph Network to create an open marketplace of Indexers and Curators that work together to efficiently index and serve all the data for DeFi and Web3 in a decentralized way."

History

"At our last startup, the Co-Founders and I started building dApps on Ethereum and realized there wasn’t a decentralized way to index and query data. dApps need a way to get and transform data from underlying data sources. IPFS provides cheap storage and Ethereum enables atomic transactions but data is rarely stored in a format you can consume directly in your applications. It was difficult to get data to power web or mobile apps directly from an Ethereum node. dApp developers were having to reinvent the wheel for each use case and build a custom backend to handle data processing for their dApps. The situation was similar to the beginning of the internet when people were building their own servers in C++. We decided to focus our efforts there and on helping to make building on Web3 accessible to anyone - and that’s how we started The Graph. We have been working on The Graph for almost three years."

Token

Launch

"We haven't released any details regarding a future token sale. The Graph's mainnet is planned for later this year. We plan to distribute Graph Tokens (GRT) in conjunction with the network launch, since the tokens are required for staking and signaling in The Graph Network."

"The Graph Foundation announced today the successful sale of 400 million GRT tokens for $12 million in funding, performed entirely on-chain using The Graph’s own technology. The sale represents 4% of the total GRT supply and included 4,500 participants across 90 countries."

Token allocation

  • From its blog (24-9-2020):

"Total GRT supply at mainnet launch will be 10 billion tokens, and new token issuance in the form of indexing rewards will begin at 3% annually and is subject to future independent technical governance."

  • Full distribution can be viewed in their blog (13-10-2020), but it comes down to about 6% for the public sale.

Utility

"The protocol’s native token, GRT, is relatively under-the-radar from the broader crypto community, however, it offers a sound token economic model for value accrual while heavily abstracting away the need for the native token from the end-user.
Users pay fees to query data in the form of ETH or DAI while validators receive upside by staking GRT and earning an exogenous asset for running the infrastructure. In parallel, Graph indexers will earn inflation rewards in GRT."

  • From its blog (24-9-2020):

"GRT will be an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain, used to allocate resources in the network. Active Indexers, Curators and Delegators can earn income from the network proportional to the amount of work they perform and their GRT stake."

Burns

  • From its blog (24-9-2020):

"A portion of protocol query fees are burned, expected to start at ~1% of total protocol query fees and subject to future technical governance. The withdrawal tax that is incurred by Curators and Delegators withdrawing their GRT is also burned, as well as any unclaimed rebate rewards."

Token Details

Tech

  • Docs can be found here (2-10-2020).
  • Code can be viewed [insert here]. Says it hosts its code through Radicle (17-2-2021).

Implementations

"Early on, we decided to build the node in Rust over Go, and we were very satisfied with our decision. Rust has a more reliable type system, doesn’t suffer from memory management and garbage collection issues, and creates super fast rock solid executables. We also standardized on AssemblyScript for our mappings which compile to a WASM runtime. WASM has emerged as a standard for safely running user-defined code in a safe way with high performance. Data is stored in a PostgresDB, but we’d love the community to work on a next generation database in the future."

How it works

"Using The Graph project, anyone can create a GraphQL schema (Subgraph) and define blockchain data APIs according to their need. The Graph nodes use that schema to extract, and index that data and provide you simple GraphQL APIs to access it."

  • From its blog (24-9-2020):

"Curators are subgraph developers, data consumers or community members who signal to Indexers which APIs should be indexed by The Graph Network. Curators deposit GRT into a bonding curve to signal on a specific subgraph and earn a portion of query fees for the subgraphs they signal on; incentivizing the highest quality data sources. Curators will curate on subgraphs and deposit GRT via the Graph Explorer dApp. Because this occurs on a bonding curve, that means that the earlier you signal on a subgraph, the greater share of the query fees you earn on that subgraph for a given amount of GRT deposited.

Delegators are individuals who would like to contribute to securing the network but do not want to run a Graph Node themselves. Delegators contribute by delegating GRT to existing Indexers and they earn a portion of query fees and indexing rewards in return. Delegators select Indexers based on their performance on measures like query fee rates, past slashing and uptime as well as delegator parameters like the cut of fees and rewards from the Indexer. Delegators will delegate and undelegate GRT on Indexers via the Graph Explorer dApp.

Consumers are the end-users of The Graph that query subgraphs and pay query fees to the Indexers, Curators and Delegators. Consumers are likely to be developers or projects themselves that cover query fees for their applications as they would AWS or cloud service costs. However, some applications will pass on query fees to users or bundle the cost in product fees. Consumers will pay for query fees via “gateways” or wallets that will be built on top of open source contracts in The Graph Network.

Indexers that stake GRT operate in a query marketplace where they earn query fees for indexing services and serving queries to subgraphs - like serving Uniswap trade data on Uniswap.info. The price of these queries will be set by Indexers and vary based on cost to index the subgraph, the demand for queries, the amount of curation signal and the market rate for blockchain queries. Since Consumers (ie. applications) are paying for queries, the aggregate cost is expected to be much lower than the costs of running a server and database.

A Gateway is required to allow consumers to connect to the network and to facilitate payments. The team behind The Graph will initially run a set of gateways that allows applications to cover the query costs on behalf of their users. These gateways facilitate connecting to The Graph Network. Anyone will be able to run their own gateways as well. Gateways handle state channel logistics for query fees, and route to Indexers as a function of price, performance and security that is predetermined by the application paying for those queries."

Staking

  • From its blog (24-9-2020):

"Indexers are node operators in The Graph Network that stake Graph Tokens (GRT) in order to provide indexing and query processing services. Indexers earn query fees and indexer rewards for their services.

GRT that is staked in the protocol is subject to a thawing period and can be slashed if Indexers are malicious and serve incorrect data to applications or if they index incorrectly. Curators and Delegators cannot be slashed for bad behavior, yet there is a withdrawal tax on Curators and Delegators to disincentivize poor decision making that could harm the integrity of the network. Curators also earn fewer query fees if they choose to curate on a low-quality subgraph, since there will be fewer queries to process or fewer indexers to process those queries."

"In the first 24 hours after launch, over 17% of total Indexer allocation has already been staked. PoolTogether is the first subgraph being indexed on The Graph Network mainnet, with over ~40M GRT already staked by indexers that are processing those queries."

  • From their blog (24-3-2021):

"The Graph Network has been live for three months now with over 160 Indexers and 6,000 Delegators onboard. Over 2.7B GRT (27% of all GRT) has been staked and delegated by Indexers and Delegators, equating to $4.3 Billion TVL"

  • From Our Network (19-6-2021):

"There are over 7K Delegators and over 150 Indexers contributing to The Graph. 2.9B GRT has been staked (allocated) on the network."

Liquidity Mining

Scaling

Interoperability

  • From their blog (9-10-2020):

"The Graph announced that they are bringing generalized state channels to Ethereum mainnet, through a collaboration with State Channels in the Consensys Mesh R&D group and Connext. In order to enable granular micropayments for metered usage of blockchain infrastructure, The Graph adopted State Channel’s Nitro protocol and server wallet implementation. State channels are a scaling technology solution that Ethereum developers have explored since the blockchain first launched in 2015."

Other Details

Rebate Pool

  • From its blog (24-9-2020):

"In addition to query fees and indexing rewards, there is a Rebate Pool that rewards all network participants based on their contributions to The Graph Network. The rebate pool is designed to encourage Indexers to allocate stake in rough proportion to the amount of query fees they earn for the network.

A portion of query fees contributed to the Rebate Pool are distributed as rebate rewards using the Cobbs-Douglas Production Function, a function of contributions to the pool and their allocation of stake on a subgraph where the query fees were generated. This reward function has the property that when Indexers allocate stake in proportion to their share of contribution of fees to the rebate pool, they will receive back exactly 100% of their contributed fees back as a rebate. This is also the optimal allocation."

Privacy Method

Compliance

Oracle Method

"The Graph is integrating with Chainlink to allow indexed data from The Graph’s APIs, called subgraphs, to be relayed to smart contracts via Chainlink oracles, according to The Graph’s blog post announcement. As part of the integration, The Graph will index DEX liquidity data that Chainlink oracles can bridge to DEX UIs as reference data for calculating slippage based on a user’s trade size. The Graph will also track gas prices paid per transaction and plans to develop a universal API to allow smart contracts access to any subgraph using a Chainlink decentralized oracle network."

Their Projects

Scalar

"The Graph has introduced Scalar, a microtransaction system meant to enable new ways for the platform’s node operators and data providers to make money. Scalar was co-developed by The Graph Foundation and software developer Edge & Node with Connext, a peer-to-peer, cross-chain liquidity network specializing in microtransactions. Using state channels, where users can interact directly with one another more efficiently outside of the blockchain, Scalar aggregates and compresses transactions before they are finalized on-chain."

Governance

  • "All future protocol governance will also be hosted on Radicle" (12-3-2021).

The Graph Council

"The mandate of The Graph Council will be to make sure The Graph continues to be a stable foundation for applications that are designed to run forever, while also fulfilling The Graph’s vision of becoming a global open API layer for decentralized data. In addition to technical governance, The Graph Council will govern over The Graph Foundation community grants from the foundation’s GRT allocation."

  • From their blog (30-10-2020):

"This council will be a 6-of-10 multisig that balances the interests of five core stakeholder groups: Indexers, active token holders, the initial team, users and technical domain experts. As the protocol matures, The Graph’s governance will decentralize further, following in the footsteps of projects like Compound, MakerDAO and Livepeer, which have taken a similar path. For example, a future evolution of The Graph Council could be to replace individual members with nested multsigs or DAOs, allowing core interest groups to have meta-governance so more stakeholders can participate.

The Graph Council will carry out its mandate to oversee several core functions:

  1. 1. The Graph Foundation Operations
  2. 2. Grants and Ecosystem Funding
  3. 3. Protocol Upgrades
  4. 4. Protocol Parameterization
  5. 5. Emergency Protocol Operations

The protocol should be governed to maximize value to all stakeholders, including those who do not hold Graph Tokens, such as end-users that may rely on The Graph for access to critical financial services. The protocol should not be governed according to plutocratic interests."

DAO

Upgrades

Roadmap

  • Can be found here (9-7-2020):

"Here’s our development roadmap with key milestones:

  1. Open source — The first version of the software is a standalone indexer for Ethereum and IPFS. The node subscribes to events in Ethereum, executes user provided scripts to transform the data, indexes that data, and makes it available over GraphQL. The scripts run on WASM so processing the data is fast and results are deterministic. This release will establish the developer API for building on The Graph and will solve many problems that teams currently have to solve themselves like handling block reorgs and push updates.
  2. Hosted service — Projects will be able to run their own nodes but we want to provide a hosted service to make it easier for teams to build on The Graph. We’ll run this service at a loss to support projects and kickstart our community.
  3. Whitepaper — We wrote an early version of our whitepaper in March but we’ve improved the design since then. After launch, we plan to publish a more detailed whitepaper with all the recent updates.
  4. Decentralized network — The decentralized network will allow anyone to run a node to contribute indexing, caching, validation, and query processing to the network. An efficient marketplace will be setup so that nodes can earn fees for their services and projects can have a low cost, dependable, decentralized indexing solution."

"The Graph plans to launch its mainnet network within the next two months, which will allow token holders and other infrastructure operators to begin staking and earning tokens by facilitating data requests from The Graph customers."

  • From their blog (24-3-2021):

"Starting next month the first production subgraphs will begin migrating from The Graph’s hosted service to the decentralized network! The Graph’s mainnet migration process will happen in three key phases: Migration Bootstrapping, Production Dapps, and Curation Live."

Audits

  • Bug bounty program can be found here (1-2-2021). Says (24-9-2020) there is one upcoming. Got released and is one of the more in depth bug bounty pages within the space:

"Up to 0.5% of GRT supply is being allocated to The Graph Bounty Program to reward successful bounty hunters, reward successful bounty hunters. This allocation is separate from the 3% allocated to Mission Control Testnet Rewards.

Overall, reporting of any bug that impacts the security of The Graph will be rewarded. Rewards will range between $100 - $50,000 USD worth of GRT, at the public GRT Sale price. Rewards will depend on bug severity and complexity, as determined in The Graph’s sole discretion, the thoroughness of the reporting and cooperation.

  1. P0 Bounties - up to $50,000
  2. P1 Bounties - up to $20,000
  3. P2 Bounties - up to $5,000"

Bugs/Hacks

Usage

"The Graph is processing over 1 billion queries per month for decentralized applications built on Ethereum and IPFS. Daily query volume currently ranges between 30 and 60 million, and monthly query volume is growing at over 50% monthly.

DeFi is all the rage right now and you can see that in query volume as DeFi makes up 76%. Within DeFi, derivatives platforms are the most popular, as synthetic assets are a hot research topic and financial primitives. The launch of several yield farming programs and recent DeFi apps has driven that volume, however we do see query volume diversifying. DeFi’s portion of query volume has declined since making up over 85% of volume in March 2020. This implies that non-DeFi applications are increasingly gaining traction."

"The Graph's hosted service is now processing 220M+ queries/day - 4B in August! Absolutely mental. dApp usage on Ethereum is going parabolic "

  • From its blog (24-9-2020):

"Community Stats: 2.3k+ subgraphs deployed, 3k+ Developers, 200+ Indexers, 400+ Curators"

"Over the last 6 months, 200+ Indexers deployed Graph Nodes on testnet to help improve and stress test the network; achieving ~1K queries per second with 99% reliability. Indexers are located in more than 40 different countries and gateways are globally distributed, that choose Indexers in real-time based on characteristics like their latency, performance and price."

  • From Our Network #60 (27-2-2021):

"Over 11B queries processed in January by The Graph’s hosted service, which is 37% MoM growth or ~20% 3mo MoM, with avg daily query volume exceeding 400M. DeFi continues to be the main volume driver but adoption of NFT subgraphs is picking up. It’s been 2 months since mainnet and there are 160+ indexers and 5,000+ delegators contributing to The Graph network."

  • From Our Network (1-5-2021):

"Over 600 million queries are processed per day, totaling over 19 billion in March alone. This usage has been driven by the increasing adoption of Ethereum dapps and expansion in supporting multiple EVM-based chains including Celo, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain."

  • From Our Network (19-6-2021):

"In its lifetime, The Graph's hosted service processed over 130 billion queries for top DeFi, NFT, and scaling dapps. From 1 billion queries in June 2020 to over 25B queries processed in May 2021 alone."

Projects that use or built on it

  • The list is huge, but some are mentioned below.
  • From its blog (24-9-2020):

"Currently, The Graph’s hosted service is processing over 4 billion monthly queries for applications like Uniswap, CoinGecko and Synthetix, for data like token prices, past trade volumes, and liquidity."

  • From Our Network (1-5-2021):

"This week, The Graph began migrating subgraphs from the hosted service to the decentralized network. After more than 90 days of bootstrapping indexing on mainnet, the network is ready to begin processing queries.

Audius, DODO, Enzyme, Gnosis, Livepeer, mStable, Opyn, PoolTogether, Reflexer, and UMA are the first 10 subgraphs that have begun migrating over. Since December, only the PoolTogether had received allocations, averaging more than 400M GRT allocated by Indexers. However, in Phase 1 of the migration, Indexers are slowly beginning to allocate towards new subgraphs in preparation for Phase 2, which is when queries will be sent on mainnet."

Competition

"Both, The Graph and Bitquery use GraphQL extensively and enable GraphQL APIs to provide freedom to end-users to query blockchain data flexibly. Both projects remove infrastructure costs for end-users and provide them with a model where they pay only for what they use.

The Graph only supports Etheruem and IPFS. However, Bitquery supports more than 20 blockchains and allows you to query any of them using GraphQL APIs. With Bitquery, you only need to learn GraphQL and use our schema to query the blockchain. However, with The Graph, you also need to understand coding because you need to deploy your schema if the data you are looking not available through community schema.

Bitquery’s technology stack is optimized for performance and reliability. Besides, our centralized architecture helps us optimizing latency and response rate and other performance metrics. The Graph decentralization approach makes it a robust network for data access. However, The Graph is still working to achieve continuous performance delivery.

The Graph is a fully open source project. Developers can verify the codebase, fork it, or integrate it according to their needs. We at Bitquery also embrace open source development and make our tools open source as much as we can. For example, our Explorer’s front end is entirely open-source, but our backend is closed source.

Currently, both projects provide their APIs are free."

Coin Distribution

Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Has gained huge usage within two years.
  • Has three different core dev teams.

Cons

"They were firmly a centralized product for the first 3 years of their existence, and just recently launched their decentralized protocol. They have many "indexers" on the platform who people need to trust in order to get query data from them. The easy way would be to have governance vote on a trusted set of indexers. But that's not decentralized! So instead, they have a staking mechanism where anyone can be an indexer and stakes their GRT token on a "subgraph" (set of queries), which can be slashed if they misbehave. That is more decentralized. But that's also "inefficient". Each indexer now needs to buy GRT, and pick an amount to stake, and you have to build in a slashing mechanism, and have some way to judge what really counts as misbehavior, etc. All of those things add cost, complexity, and time."

Team, Funding, Partners

Team

  • Full team can be found [here].
  • Eva Beylin — Ecosystem Strategy / EIR
  • The Graph Foundation is also led by Eva Beylin (1-10-2020).
  • Yaniv Tal; the Co-Founder and Project Lead
  • Members of the Graph Council have been installed (11-12-2020).
  • Tegan Kline
  • Awarded a $60 million grant to StreamingFast to join The Graph ecosystem as a core developer team (6-2021).
  • From their Figment mailing list (2-8-2021):

"We are officially diving further into The Graph ecosystem as a core dev team on The Graph. We will receive 80M GRT over the span of 5 years for the development work we perform on The Graph."

  • The Graph awarded a $60M Grant to Semiotic AI to join The Graph as a Core Developer (12-2021).

Funding

Framework, ParaFi Capital, CoinFund, Collider, Lemniscap, Reciprocal, Compound, DCG and 122 West.

Partners

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