Over the last year on The Graph’s hosted service, we saw this trend play out first hand. Developers use The Graph to extract data from the blockchain and make it available to Web3 (the decentralized Internet) applications. As we move towards a decentralized web, an “indexing layer” such as The Graph will be a mainstay of the Web3 stack, enabling applications to load quickly and providing a good user experience. In 2020, we saw The Graph’s hosted service usage statistics explode.

The hosted service query volume increased 100x in 2020 from 100 Million queries in the month of January 2020 to over 11 Billion in the month of January 2021 alone. The number of subgraphs (open APIs) on The Graph grew from ~1k Subgraphs in January to over 7k Subgraphs by the end of the year. While Subgraphs do not provide the complete picture of development on Ethereum, they are a very good proxy for Web3 development activity. This momentous growth came primarily from DeFi, NFT art and collectibles and DAOs, showing the wealth of potential for different verticals to get onboard the decentralised web.

Double clicking on DeFi query volumes, it is no surprise that DEXs and AMM strategies, driven by Uniswap, Balancer and Curve, make up the bulk of query volumes in the DeFi vertical, followed by derivatives. The latter is not at all surprising given that in 2021, I expect to see a boom in all manner of DeFi derivative projects from options to futures to synthetic assets.

What else have we learnt? First, an indexing layer such as The Graph is here to stay, as it is now an integral part of the Web3 stack. Writing code for syncing and indexing blockchain data is simply too expensive, time consuming and error prone and we have seen developers recognize this fact en masse.

The larger trend is that we are at an important juncture in blockchain development where tooling and innovation work hand in hand. By analogy when the Internet was in its infancy 25 years ago, there was a lot of work on software and infrastructure that improved the developer experience. For example, the emergence of web service stacks such as LAMP were critical in reducing costs to the point that small development teams could bring products to market. We are at a similar point in blockchain development where higher layers of the stack such as oracles and indexing are coming together to improve the developer experience.

We are at a pivotal juncture in blockchain development on the cusp of a great innovation boom. With the emergence of a blockchain development stack, developers can easily build truly decentralized and serverless applications, something that was not even possible a year ago. The DeFi snowball was the start of the decentralized avalanche.

I think the movement from Web2 to Web3 has well and truly begun. Most of what exists on the Internet today will be decentralized on Web3 and many new innovations will continue to come with this revolutionary technology. We see glimmers of what is to come in 2021. “Arts and collectables” accounted for 14% of all subgraphs and 4% of query volume while “gaming” and “DAOs” are ones to watch at 8% of subraphs each. These are just some of the exciting areas experiencing a major growth spurt.

Finally, while Ethereum is dominant (and will likely remain dominant), we are moving towards a multiblockchain world. We have seen other Layer 1 blockchains recognize the need for an indexing layer and we expect all major Layer 1 blockchains to have such a layer in place before they can be successful. This will be especially important once data is spread across multiple blockchains and storage layers.

Society is only just beginning to realize the importance of decentralization. This year we will see more decentralized websites, services, tools and apps than ever before. We are witnessing the last days of the centralized legacy institutions. The change to decentralization will not happen overnight and DeFi is only the first major decentralized snowball to be thrown. The Graph will play its role in the evolution of the internet and open the gates of Web3 to all developers and entrepreneurs.

Today, The Graph Foundation announced a successful public sale of GRT, The Graph’s native token, selling $12M to the community. During the sale, 4% of the total token supply (400M tokens) was allocated to over 4,500 individuals outside the U.S. who successfully passed KYC compliance, from more than 90 countries. These O.G.’s (Original Graphers) will be the initial GRT community members at The Graph’s mainnet launch, expected in 30–60 days.

Wide distribution of the GRT token was a primary goal of the sale. The GRT sale accomplished this goal with significant representation from Russia, Vietnam, China, India and Great Britain, with participation from 99 countries in total.

Individuals that hold GRT will be able to participate in The Graph Network as Indexers, Curators or Delegators by providing their services to decentralized applications. Read more about these roles in The Graph Network In-Depth. With over 200 Indexers in the testnet, more than 2,000 Curators registered for the Curator Program and now more than 4,500 GRT holders across the world, The Graph is one of the most decentralized and global protocols in Web3.

Sale Methodology

As outlined in The Graph’s Sale and Distribution, the GRT Sale was constructed with three phases to optimize for distribution to contributing community members and to mitigate the risk of a gas war.

Each registrant had an individual purchase cap allocated to them so the sale could accommodate as many participants as possible and eliminate the possibility of large purchasers or bots from buying up the sale.

Sale participants were required to successfully complete KYC and a registration form where they answered questions about their understanding of The Graph, interest in DeFi and Web3, and willingness to contribute to the network. Based on answers to these questions and past contributions, phases and individual caps were assigned between $1,000 and $5,000 USD equivalent.

There is no doubt many talented community members did not get a chance to participate in Phase 1 and the process was not 100% perfect, but using this system it was guaranteed that at least 3,000 individuals from all walks of life bound only by their understanding of The Graph and their alignment to the decentralization mission would be able to participate.

• Phase 1 — Selected participants, up to 24 hours to purchase (Thurs, Oct 22 at 9am PDT)
• Phase 2 — All successfully registered participants, first come first served (Fri, Oct 23 at 9am PDT)
• Phase 3 — First come first served, if tokens remaining (Sat, Oct 24 at 9am PDT)

14,000 individuals successfully registered for the sale. In Phase 1, about 300M GRT tokens were allocated and registrants were given 24 hours to purchase up to their individual caps. Once Phase 1 completed, all other registrants could participate in Phase 2 where about 100M GRT tokens were reserved for purchase. Due to significant demand, those tokens sold out in about 11 minutes, leaving no tokens remaining for Phase 3 and the sale completed early.

First Sale of its Kind

The Graph’s sale was the first of its kind. The Graph Foundation decided to host the sale entirely on Ethereum and The Graph to demonstrate the great power of building on Web3. The GRT Sale dApp was built using a subgraph and integrated with Metamask and Wallet Connect. The dApp functioned flawlessly with no hiccups or downtime despite the violent spikes in traffic, a testament to the power of Web3. Overall, the foundation is pleased that the sale went smoothly and that the community enjoyed the novel experience.

Ian Worrall, Founder of TokenWeb.io said:

“That was the most streamlined and professional token sale experience I’ve ever had during my 8 years in crypto. Hats off to you, Tegan, and the whole Graph team — well done and congratulations!”

All sale participants purchased preGRT a pre-functional, non-transferable token. At the time of network launch, a genesis distribution of GRT will take place with a 1:1 mapping of preGRT to GRT. If you participated in the sale, you can see the preGRT tokens in your Metamask wallet by adding the crowdsale address. Make sure to add 18 decimals!

The Road to Mainnet

The next major milestone on The Graph’s roadmap is the mainnet launch of The Graph Network, which is estimated to be in 30–60 days. This will be Wave 1 of the mainnet launch, whereby the network smart contracts will be deployed and there will be genesis distribution of GRT. At this time, all sale participant addresses will receive their equivalent GRT.

Once the network launches, Indexers and Delegators will be able to provide indexing and delegation services through the Graph Node CLI and members of the Curator Program and Mission Control Testnet will be able to stake through the Graph Explorer dApp in private beta. Subgraph migration from the hosted service to the decentralized network will also begin during Wave 1.

In Wave 2, the network will be autonomous and any community members and organizations can build on the protocol and develop apps for the ecosystem. At this time, Edge & Node will release a Graph Explorer and Gateway dApp that can supplement other applications to give users access to the protocol.

All sale participants will receive emails from The Graph Foundation with more information as the network approaches launch.

Get Involved with The Graph Network

To learn more about The Graph, check out the social channels to stay up to date with the community and technical progress:

• Read the blog
• Join the Discord
• Join the Telegram
• Follow The Graph on Twitter
• Subscribe to the newsletter

If you’re an application developer, make sure to check out the Graph Explorer to see which subgraphs are live and ready to be integrated! Or read the docs to learn how to deploy a new subgraph.

If you were not able to participate in the GRT Sale, there are other ways to get involved and contribute to The Graph Network in various roles. Join the Curator Program to learn about curation on the network to accurately identify valuable subgraphs for Indexers. You can also look out for our upcoming bug bounties and Ambassador’s Program.

About The Graph

The Graph is the indexing and query layer of the decentralized web. Developers build and publish open APIs, called subgraphs, that applications can query using GraphQL. There is a hosted service in production that makes it simple for developers to start building on The Graph, and the decentralized network will be launching later this year. The Graph currently supports indexing data from Ethereum, IPFS, and PoA with more networks coming soon.

To date, over 3,000 subgraphs have been deployed by thousands of developers for applications, such as Uniswap, Synthetix, Aragon, Gnosis, Balancer, Livepeer, DAOstack, AAVE, Decentraland, and many others. Prior to The Graph Sale, The Graph raised $12.7M over the last three years to fund The Graph Network development.

Testnet website: https://thegraph.com/testnet

Blog: https://thegraph.com/blog/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thegraph/

Everest: https://everest.link

The Graph Sells Out $12M in GRT Public Sale as it Marches Toward Mainnet Launch was originally published in The Graph on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

SAN FRANCISCO, OCTOBER 9, 2020 — Today, 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. Many teams have previously tried to commercialize the technology but The Graph is the first project to deploy generalized state channels at scale. This is a major milestone for The Graph, state channels, and the Ethereum ecosystem at large.

The new state channels bolster Ethereum’s trust minimized payments to support thousands of transactions per second (TPS). An audit of the protocol implementation was supported by the Ethereum Foundation.

The Graph is committed to the continued development and prosperity of the Ethereum ecosystem. Founded nearly three years ago, The Graph organizes and helps make Ethereum blockchain data accessible to developers and their users everywhere. Today, over one million unique users are using The Graph’s APIs per week.

The optimized server wallet implementation will become open source and available to anyone else in the industry as soon as the audit, performed by Consensys Diligence, is complete. This milestone is an example of how foundation grants, open source software, and venture funded protocols can come together in a meaningful way to drive progress.

The Graph Network’s State Channels

State channels allow participants to coordinate off-chain with security enforced on-chain. They’re a cousin of the simpler HTLCs in payment channel systems like Bitcoin’s Lightning Network and Ethereum’s Raiden. While payment channels only allow participants to send payments, generalized state channels are more powerful and allow arbitrary logic to be executed in the channels.

In The Graph Network, Indexers compete to provide the best indexing and query processing service at the lowest price. Indexers choose which subgraphs to index and can set prices granularly per query. The combination of query fees and indexer rewardsthrough new token issuance creates incentives for node operators to run the software and optimize database access to ensure that applications have fast reliable access to organized blockchain data.

Convenient Access with Gateways

Gateways simplify connecting to the The Graph Network. The job of a gateway is to select Indexers as a function of price, performance, and security, and then setup and use state channels for query fees, verify attestations and submit disputes. In the early days of the network we expect that dApp developers will pay query fees on behalf of their users. This is because state channel wallet UX could still use improvement and it will take time to educate users on the benefits of Web3.

Over time The Graph invites the community to move to a model where gateways are superceded with standalone query engines that run on the end user’s device, giving the end user more power and control. This is at the core of what makes the Web3 platform. Full-stack decentralization will enable applications that are resistant to business failures and rent seeking and also facilitate an unprecedented level of interoperability. Users and developers will be able to know that software they invest time and money into can’t suddenly disappear.

To reach this vision, it’s critical that we shift from a paradigm of businesses paying for the ongoing storage, compute, and other services required to keep an application running, toward users directly paying networks of decentralized service providers for granular usage of the services they consume. Making it economically viable for users to pay for services as opposed to relying on intermediaries.

State channel wallets, state channel nodes, and The Graph’s decentralized network are key ingredients to make this vision real. Today’s announcement of The Graph heading to mainnet with the industry’s first at scale deployment of generalized state channels is a major milestone along that journey. We can’t wait to see what this breakthrough technology becomes at scale.

Be sure to catch the State Channels at Scale talk at ETH Online, today at 12pm PT to do a deep dive into the technical detail of how this is being achieved.

About The Graph

The Graph is an indexing protocol for organizing and efficiently accessing data from blockchains and storage networks. The Graph has been running a hosted service since January 2019 with over 2,900 subgraphs deployed for Web3 and DeFi applications built on Ethereum, IPFS and POA, like Uniswap, Synthetix, DaoStack, Aave, Balancer, Gnosis, Aragon, and more.

Join our community by introducing yourself in the Discord for technical discussions, join our Telegram chat, or follow The Graph on Twitter! Our developers are always eager to chat with you, and The Graph ecosystem has a growing community of developers working to build the decentralized future.

Testnet website: https://thegraph.com/testnet

Blog: https://thegraph.com/blog/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thegraph/

Everest: https://everest.link

The Graph Brings Scalable State Channels to Ethereum in Partnership with State Channels & Connext was originally published in The Graph on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Graph is a protocol for organizing blockchain data and making it easily accessible. It’s powering many of the most used applications in DeFi and the broader Web3 ecosystem today. 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.

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. However, 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.

The network will allow apps to be serverless — making them truly unstoppable since they’ll no longer rely on a single server or database but rather a network of nodes that are incentivized to keep the service running. The Graph Network also lets diverse, active participants earn income for providing data services rather than giving that power to data monopolies.

The Graph is transforming the existing data economy to one with better incentives, safer data sources, curated APIs and more expressive querying. The Graph Network will be launching later this year.

The Graph Network Roles

There are multiple ways to contribute to The Graph Network and the open data economy for both technical and non-technical individuals.

Indexers (Earn GRT)

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.

Technical Level Required: Advanced

Curators (Earn GRT)

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.

Technical Level Required: Moderate

Delegators (Earn GRT)

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.

Technical Level Required: Low

Consumers (Pay GRT)

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.

Introducing Graph Token (GRT)

The Graph is working to bring reliable decentralized public infrastructure to the mainstream market. To ensure economic security of The Graph Network and the integrity of data being queried, participants use Graph Tokens (GRT). GRT is a work token that is locked-up by Indexers, Curators and Delegators in order to provide indexing and curating services to the network.

Work Token Model

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. 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. More information about token distribution and technical governance will be released as we approach network launch.

Incentives in The Graph Network

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.

Query Marketplace

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.

Indexing Rewards

In addition to query fees, Indexers and Delegators will earn indexing rewards in the form of GRT that is new token issuance distributed proportional to Curator signal and allocated stake. Indexing rewards will start at 3% annually. Future GRT monetary policy will be set by an independent technical governance which will be established as we approach network launch.

The Graph Network will have epochs which are measured in blocks and are used for the Indexing Rewards calculations.

Cobbs-Douglas Production Function

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 rewardsusing 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.

Protocol Sinks & Burns

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 aforementioned withdrawal tax that is incurred by Curators and Delegators withdrawing their GRT is also burned, as well as any unclaimed rebate rewards

Delegation Parameters

Each Indexer specifies how Delegators are rewarded based on the following two delegation parameters:

• Reward cut — The % of indexing rewards that the Indexer keeps.
• Fee cut — The % of query fees that the Indexer keeps.

Indexers accept delegated stake according to a delegation capacity, which is a multiple of their own contributed stake. This ratio between Indexer and Delegator stake will be set through technical governance.

All of these mechanisms combined are designed to produce an open efficient marketplace for data services on top of fully decentralized infrastructure.

Summary

• Community Stats: 2.3k+ subgraphs deployed, 3k+ Developers, 200+ Indexers, 400+ Curators
• Token Ticker: GRT
• Total Initial Token Supply: 10 billion
• New Issuance Schedule: Starting at ~3% annually, up to technical governance
• Token Burning: Expected to be ~1% of query fees and all withdrawal taxes are burnt, up to technical governance
• Maximum Token supply: 10 billion minted + new issuance — burning

Get involved in The Graph Network!

Anyone can be an Indexer, Curator or Delegator and stake GRT against their work in the protocol.

There have already been over 2,300 subgraphs deployed by more than 3,000 developers and more than 200 Indexers are already participating in the incentivized testnet. As we approach mainnet launch of The Graph Network, there will be many ways you can get involved in our ecosystem:

• Follow over 200 Indexers in our Mission Control Incentivized testnet
• Spin up a node as an Indexer prior to the mainnet launch later this year
• Register to be a Curator in our Curator Program before registration closes
• Upcoming Ambassador’s Program to grow The Graph community
• Upcoming Bug Bounty Program to help find vulnerabilities and secure the protocol
• Become an Indexer or Delegator at mainnet launch of The Graph Network

Look out for more information on how you can participate in our upcoming programs by subscribing to the newsletter, joining our Discord or Telegram and following us on Twitter. You can also check out our blog for updates.

The Graph GRT Token Economics was originally published in The Graph on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

With over 200 Indexers on The Graph’s Testnet, Curators are now invited to participate!

SAN FRANCISCO, SEPTEMBER 17, 2020 — Today The Graph announced the launch of its Curator Program. CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, Messari, Delphi Digital, Zapper, Synthetix, Pool Together, LivePeer, mStable and Balancer are all preregistered to be Curators on The Graph Network. If you would like to be a Curator on The Graph network, please Register Here.

With over 210 Indexers running Graph Nodes in Mission Control, the incentivized testnet, The Graph is in the final stages of decentralizing the query layer of DeFi and Web3. During Mission Control, Indexers have been operating servers running The Graph’s software, completing technical missions and contributing to improving The Graph Network. Now that Indexers are busy running an early version of the network, The Graph is inviting Curators to register to join them.

TM Lee, Co-founder at CoinGecko, says

“The Graph has enabled us at CoinGecko to easily track the DeFi markets on Ethereum and we are always on the lookout for new market data that is useful for our users. Because of that, we are really excited to be participating as curator on The Graph network to help push the frontiers of data aggregation in a decentralized setting. “

Subgraph Curation

Developers of decentralized applications need to rely on accurate and efficient APIs but since subgraphs are open-source and can be built by anyone, it can be difficult to identify which subgraphs are high-quality. To solve this, The Graph introduces Curation, to enable information sharing in The Graph ecosystem. Curators are vital to the protocol as they signal on specific subgraphs to indicate to Indexers which data should be indexed.

Curators stake GRT on subgraphs, to mint “signal” along a bonding curve specific to that subgraph. The signal is used to dictate the distribution of curation rewards — a cut of that subgraph’s query fees that go to Curators of that subgraph. Curators are incentivized to signal on the highest quality and most used subgraphs, to ensure applications are querying the correct APIs and to earn fees for their curation work. This forms a curation market for APIs of on-chain data.

“Querying on-chain data is not trivial and can be very costly. The Graph gives Zapper a nice and effective way to query the blockchain and allows us to push new protocol integrations faster. We are excited to be a Curator on The Graph Network to help signal to Indexers which subgraphs they should query. “

— Nodar Janashia, Co-founder at Zapper

Curators can be subgraph developers, users or community members! You don’t need to be very technical to be a Curator- all you need is an Ethereum wallet (eg. Metamask), testnet GRT to signal through our Graph Explorer dApp and knowledge of the Ethereum ecosystem and dApps.

We’re at the beginning of a revolution in how humans cooperate and organize on the internet. As more and more data becomes available through open protocols, knowledgeable Curators who make decisions about what data to surface will become increasingly important. Now is a great time to learn how The Graph works and how to contribute to this future.

Curator Missions

As part of the Curator Program, Curators will be expected to complete various missions in our Mission Control Incentivized Testnet. Missions will include but are not limited to:

• Bootstrapping curation signal on testnet (via Graph Explorer dApp)
• Creating content, memes and social sharing about curating on The Graph
• Completing product testing and user studies
• Contributing to Github repos, Wiki, docs and other communications
• Building and publishing subgraphs

Not all missions are required to be completed but we hope Curators will contribute as much as possible to The Graph Network. Our Indexers have already gotten heavily involved in our testnet and now we’re thrilled to have Curators join The Graph community too!

Curation Grants

The Graph is allocating up to 3% of the total token supply to Curators as a grant allocation of GRT to curate on subgraphs when the network launches. Final allocations to Curators will be based on the completion of missions, contributions to the testnet and mainnet launch.

For the first year this allocation will only be usable for curation signaling and will be locked. During this period, the Curator will be able to signal on subgraphs and unsignal to signal on different subgraphs. Query fees that Curators earn from staking their granted GRT on subgraphs will not be locked.

Procedural Requirements

If you are interested in being a Curator and participating in this early access program, please fill out this form to register. Once registration is complete, The Graph team will be in touch to ask for required documentation to qualify as a Curator Program participant, see below:

• Signed The Graph Curator Agreement
• Know Your Customer (KYC) documentation

US participants, including US-based entities, will need to be accredited investors, non-US persons or non-US entities do not need to be accredited. If you do not meet this criteria, we still want to hear from you! Please sign up to our Community Registration to be on the list for future opportunities.

Once you receive the Curator Agreement, please carefully review all terms and conditions about testnet scores and eligibility for rewards.

We expect curator teams to communicate with us throughout the process, including but not limited to:

• Joining The Graph Discord channel: https://thegraph.com/discord
• Discussing data that would be valuable to have on The Graph, evaluating existing subgraphs and other data needs for applications
• Providing qualitative and quantitative feedback about the protocol, products (eg. subgraphs, explorer dApp) and Graph ecosystem
• Bi-weekly email updates from The Graph team

For any questions about the testnet, please email tegan@thegraph.com or martin@thegraph.com.

“Very few projects have done more to push forward the promise of Web3 than The Graph. Its upcoming network launch represents one of our best opportunities to break free of Web 2.0 data monopolies and we couldn’t be more thrilled to participate in its launch as a Curator.”

— Adam Soffer, Engineer at Livepeer

Not an Indexer or Curator? Get Involved in Other Ways!

If you don’t register as an Indexer or Curator in the testnet, there will be other ways to contribute in the future:

• Become a Delegator and stake Graph Token (GRT) on Indexers
• Join our upcoming Ambassador Program to grow The Graph community
• Participate in our upcoming Bug Bounty Program

Delegators are users who want to contribute to securing the network but don’t want to run a node themselves, so they stake on existing Indexers. They will earn query fees and indexing rewards but will not be slasheable.

To keep our community flourishing, we’ll be launching an Ambassador Program that will allow key contributors to be recognized for their support. A Bug Bounty Program will also be launching later in the testnet and will run through mainnet launch.

Look out for more information on how you can participate in our Discord or on Twitter. You can also subscribe to our newsletter and read our blog for updates.

About The Graph

The Graph is an indexing protocol for organizing and efficiently accessing data from blockchains and storage networks. The Graph has been running a hosted service since January 2019 with over 2,300 subgraphs deployed for Web3 and DeFi applications built on Ethereum and IPFS, like Synthetix, Uniswap, Aave, Balancer, Gnosis, Aragon, and more.

Join our community by introducing yourself in our Discord for technical discussions, join our Telegram chat, or follow us on Twitter! Our developers are always eager to chat with you, and The Graph ecosystem has a growing community of developers working to build the decentralized future.

Testnet website: https://thegraph.com/testnet

Blog: https://thegraph.com/blog/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thegraph/

Everest: https://everest.link

Disclaimer

Please note that the program is only open to (i) U.S. persons who are “accredited investors” or (ii) non-U.S. persons. Any U.S. person who is an accredited investor will have to comply with the requisite verification process.

THE COMPETITION IS NOT AND WILL NOT BE OFFERED OR SOLD, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, TO ANY PERSON WHO IS A RESIDENT, ORGANIZED, OR LOCATED IN ANY COUNTRY OR TERRITORY SUBJECT TO OFAC COMPREHENSIVE SANCTIONS PROGRAMS FROM TIME TO TIME, INCLUDING CUBA, CRIMEA REGION OF UKRAINE, DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF KOREA, IRAN, SYRIA, ANY PERSON FOUND ON THE OFAC SPECIALLY DESIGNATED NATIONALS, BLOCKED PERSONS LIST, ANY OTHER CONSOLIDATED PROHIBITED PERSONS LIST AS DETERMINED BY ANY APPLICABLE GOVERNMENTAL AUTHORITY, OR ANY PERSONS WHO ARE ORGANIZED, LOCATED, OR RESIDENTS OF NEW YORK STATE.

The Graph Launches Curator Program with Coingecko, CMC, Messari, Delphi, Zapper & Others was originally published in The Graph on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

IPFS is one of the main protocols that The Graph currently supports. IPFS has become a standard for decentralized storage in the Web3 ecosystem and is used by countless decentralized applications. By anchoring IPFS files on-chain, you can get virtually unlimited decentralized storage with the consensus guarantees provided by Ethereum. This allows applications to build richer product experiences by including more data with stability and variability guarantees. This year, the team behind IPFS will launch Filecoin, an incentivization layer for IPFS.

The Graph participated in the Filecoin HackFS hackathon and offered bounties to the participants building with The Graph. Many amazing subgraphs came out of this hackathon! We want to highlight the two winners below.

Public Annotation Network

Public Annotation Network (PAN) is an open-source censorship-resistant web annotation service. The goal is to create a browser extension that makes it as easy as possible for users to annotate content on any web page and read annotations published by other users without the risk of being subject to censorship. Currently, the MVP is available for Chrome-based browsers and is only compatible with Twitter.

With both Metamask and PAN installed, a PAN icon displays on the right-hand side when reading a Tweet. When the icon is clicked, a user can read existing annotations for the content displayed in their browser, as well as compose an annotation and publish it through the PAN publisher service. This annotation will then be propagated through Ethereum and IPFS to other users who will be able to see it, e.g., when someone accesses that Tweet. The PAN subgraph captures all annotations, allowing anyone to easily query published data. You can find the subgraph here.

PadLock

PadLock helps artists monetize creative work via the decentralized web. Users can buy or sell access to exclusive content hosted on IPFS and Filecoin. The app generates unique encryption and decryption keys and stores them in the encrypted state of a privacy-preserving smart contract on Secret Network. The PadLock subgraph tracks data about artists and their creative works. You can find the subgraph here.

The Graph team wants to give a big thank you to all the teams that applied to the bounties and a large congratulations to the winners! We look forward to seeing many more amazing projects use The Graph when building with IPFS.

About The Graph

The Graph is the indexing and query layer of the decentralized web. Developers build and publish open APIs, called subgraphs, that applications can query using GraphQL. There is a hosted service in production that makes it simple for developers to start building on The Graph, and the decentralized network will be launching later this year. The Graph currently supports indexing data from Ethereum, IPFS, and PoA with more networks coming soon. To date, over 2,000 subgraphs have been deployed by thousands of developers for applications, such as Uniswap, Synthetix, Aragon, AAVE, Gnosis, Balancer, Livepeer, DAOstack, AAVE, Decentraland, and many others.

If you are a developer building an application or Web3 application, you can use subgraphs for indexing and querying data from blockchains. The Graph allows applications to efficiently and performantly present data in a UI and allows other developers to use your subgraph too! You can deploy a subgraph or query existing subgraphs that are in the Graph Explorer. Join our community by introducing yourself in our Discord for technical discussions, join our Telegram chat, or follow us on Twitter! Our developers are always eager to chat with you, and The Graph ecosystem has a growing community of developers who support each other.

The Graph and Filecoin HackFS Hackathon — Bounty Winners was originally published in The Graph on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You are invited to compete in Mission Control, The Graph’s incentivized testnet!

Today we’re launching Mission Control, The Graph’s incentivized testnet. Mission Control is a competition where Indexers can operate nodes, complete missions and contribute to improving The Graph Network ahead of mainnet launch. Over 15 node operators, including Staking Facilities, Certus One, Staked, Chorus One and Bloq, have already entered the mission control center by pre-registering for the testnet.

The Graph has been running a hosted service in production since January 2019, processing queries for dApps on Ethereum and IPFS like Synthetix, Uniswap, Aave, Gnosis, Aragon and more. With over 1,700 Subgraphs deployed, The Graph has become a core primitive for decentralized application development.

The team behind The Graph has spent the past two and a half years working with blockchain developers, improving subgraph features, hardening Graph Node, scaling the hosted service, and designing and building the next big step for the protocol — the decentralized network. Now the network is ready to be battle-tested with real query volume and decentralized by inviting community Indexers into The Graph’s mission control room.

Wolfgang Albrecht, Co-Founder of Staking Facilities, says

“There are heaps of crypto projects competing to do the same thing, and then there are those that are on the frontier, building novel protocols and occupying whitespace. The Graph Network is part of the latter, and we are thrilled to support the team in their mission of growing the decentralization movement through Web3.”

If you are interested in running a node and competing as an Indexer, register here. Take one small step for hacker, one giant leap for hackerkind and join us as we prepare for liftoff.

Mission Control

The Graph’s hosted service is processing over 1 billion monthly queries against subgraphs, open APIs that anyone can query with GraphQL. Once The Graph Network launches, anyone will be able to run a node to provide indexing services to the network and become a curator to ensure that data is accurate and organized.

• Indexers operate Graph Nodes and stake GRT to index blockchain data; ensuring uptime, reducing security risk of centralized databases and enabling applications to be fully serverless. Indexers earn query fees and indexing GRT token rewards for their services.
• Curators signal on subgraphs and stake GRT to indicate to Indexers which subgraphs are high-quality and should be indexed. Curators also earn a portion of query fees for the subgraphs they signal on, incentivizing them to curate the highest quality data sources.

Mission Control invites node operators interested in being Indexers to help validate economic design, test security, network capacity, Indexer and Curator performance in the protocol.

The testnet will run five phases and each phase will have specific objectives and missions that Indexers will compete in to accumulate a score. The Mission Control Leaderboard will rank performance of Indexers based on their overall scores, which will be derived from a combination of technical performance like query performance, testnet profit maximization, and qualitative contributions like metrics sharing, collaboration and feedback.

Node operators are expected to follow the rules that will be outlined when testnet launches. Indexers who compete in missions, perform well, contribute to testnet learnings and follow the rules will be eligible to earn testnet GRT testnet rewards. Visit the testnet website to learn more details about Mission Control and incentives for participating.

Participation Requirements

If you’re interested in participating in the testnet, please fill out the registration form. Once this is complete, The Graph team will be in touch to ask about further details about each phase and for required documentation to participate.

Testnet participants will also collaborate with The Graph team to learn as much as possible about the testnet. We expect validator teams to communicate with us throughout the testnet, including but not limited to:

• Joining The Graph Discord channel: https://thegraph.com/discord
• Sharing logs, DevOps metrics and other testnet data
• Providing qualitative and quantitative feedback about the protocol, products (eg. subgraphs, explorer dApp) and Graph ecosystem
• Email updates from The Graph team
• Workshops and AMAs by The Graph engineering team

All node operators will also be required to sign an Indexer Agreement to participate in the testnet and be eligible for rewards.

Technical Requirements

An Indexer will need to run server and database infrastructure to run a Graph Node locally and participate in the incentivized testnet. Node operators should be prepared (but are not required) to support ~5M queries per day throughout the testnet.

Prerequisites for participating in the testnet include:

• Server infrastructure for running Rust binaries on Linux
• Basic: use cloud service provider (eg. Google Cloud, AWS)
• Full: set up server hardware and/or data center
• Ethereum node (deployed by operator or by node service provider)
• IPFS node
• PostgreSQL
• Kubernetes or preferred container orchestration framework

Be prepared for penetration and vulnerability testing for cloud service providers and data centers.

• Check with your cloud service provider to see if they require submission and approval for vulnerability and penetration testing. Example of AWS submission.
• Check with your data-center provider if they require a vulnerability and penetration testing disclosure.

We are excited to work with the best node operators in the Web3 space to test The Graph Network and help our network participants learn about contributing to The Graph’s ecosystem. Please reach out to The Graph team if you have any further questions about the testnet.

Please note that the program is only open to (i) U.S. persons who are “accredited investors” or (ii) non-U.S. persons. Any U.S. person who is an accredited investor will have to comply with the requisite verification process.

THE COMPETITION IS NOT AND WILL NOT BE OFFERED OR SOLD, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, TO ANY PERSON WHO IS A RESIDENT, ORGANIZED, OR LOCATED IN ANY COUNTRY OR TERRITORY SUBJECT TO OFAC COMPREHENSIVE SANCTIONS PROGRAMS FROM TIME TO TIME, INCLUDING CUBA, CRIMEA REGION OF UKRAINE, DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF KOREA, IRAN, SYRIA, ANY PERSON FOUND ON THE OFAC SPECIALLY DESIGNATED NATIONALS, BLOCKED PERSONS LIST, ANY OTHER CONSOLIDATED PROHIBITED PERSONS LIST AS DETERMINED BY ANY APPLICABLE GOVERNMENTAL AUTHORITY, OR ANY PERSONS WHO ARE ORGANIZED, LOCATED, OR RESIDENTS OF NEW YORK STATE.

About The Graph

The Graph is an indexing protocol for organizing and efficiently accessing data from blockchains and storage networks.

The Graph currently supports indexing data from Ethereum, POA, and IPFS, with more networks coming soon. To date, over 1,700 subgraphs have been deployed for applications like Uniswap, Synthetix, Aragon, Gnosis, Balancer, Livepeer, DAOstack, AAVE, and Decentraland.

Join our community by introducing yourself in our Discord for technical discussions, join our Telegram chat, or follow us on Twitter! Our developers are always eager to chat with you, and The Graph ecosystem has a growing community of developers working to build the decentralized future.

Testnet website: https://thegraph.com/testnet

Blog: https://thegraph.com/blog/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thegraph/

Everest: https://everest.link

Announcing Mission Control: The Graph’s Incentivized Testnet was originally published in The Graph on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

With 1B Queries per Month on its Hosted Service, The Graph Is Preparing to Launch its Decentralized Network

SAN FRANCISCO, JUNE 30, 2020 — Today, The Graph closed $5M in a SAFT from strategic crypto funds including Framework, ParaFi Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Tally Capital, CoinIX, Collider Ventures, Lemniscap, and Sustany, with continued participation from Multicoin Capital and DTC Capital. The company previously raised a $2.5M seed round led by Multicoin in January 2019, bringing its total funding to date to $7.5M. The additional funding will be used to build and launch The Graph’s decentralized network.

As blockchain networks continue to proliferate, connecting data across platforms is a challenge for many developers and users. The Graph is an indexing protocol that enables developers to access data from thousands of applications with simplicity and ease, without limits on scale, performance, or flexibility.

“The Graph is working to make decentralization a reality. Blockchain developers have had trouble bringing their ideas to life because the infrastructure for Web3 wasn’t ready,” said The Graph’s Co-Founder, Yaniv Tal. “Teams used to spend months building proprietary indexing servers and operating the servers themselves. The Graph built an indexing protocol that allows developers to build beautiful consumer-grade applications without running servers. It’s designed to link fragmented data and make it all accessible via a convenient GraphQL API.”

The Graph has grown from seven launch partners in January 2019 to hundreds of applications including Synthetix, Uniswap, Gnosis, Aragon, Livepeer, Melonport, Decentraland, and more. These applications are querying data from open APIs built on The Graph, called subgraphs, that define how to index data like trade orders, DEX liquidity and user balances. The Graph’s hosted service currently processes 50M queries per day and boasted over 750M queries in May 2020, up 45% from April 2020.

“The Graph has done a remarkable job of getting developers to use the product in a completely grassroots way. If you asked a sample of blockchain developers what they use to index and query blockchain data, many would tell you they use The Graph. It’s a joy for us to back a market leader in what is a rapidly growing market,” said Larry Sukernik, Digital Currency Group.

“The Graph is one of the most beloved protocols in the blockchain world, on par with Chainlink and Ethereum. We couldn’t be happier to back Yaniv and the team, and we look forward to helping grow the decentralized network when it launches.” said Michael Anderson, the Co-Founder of Framework Ventures.

While The Graph’s blockchain indexer has been open-source from day one, The Graph will be transitioning from a hosted service to a decentralized network later this year. The network will be operated by independent Indexers who run nodes and process queries in an open marketplace. Curators will be able to join the network to organize data and signal which subgraphs are useful and accurate. The introduction of these new roles will ensure that decentralized applications are built on a serverless foundation with no point of failure, that applications can receive the best service at the lowest price, and that network fees are earned by members of a distributed community.

“Web3 is about building new ways for people to collaborate and organize. The Graph’s decentralized network is going to make sure that the crypto economy has a reliable open data layer for building novel applications on a trustworthy foundation,” added Tal.

To join The Graph’s community, please visit its Discord channel https://thegraph.com/discord.

About The Graph

The Graph is an indexing protocol for organizing and efficiently accessing data from blockchains and storage networks.

The Graph currently supports indexing data from Ethereum, POA, and IPFS, with more networks coming soon. To date, over 1,500 subgraphs have been deployed for dApps like Uniswap, Synthetix, Aragon, Gnosis, Balancer, Livepeer, DAOstack, AAVE, and Decentraland.

Join our community by introducing yourself in our Discord for technical discussions, join our Telegram chat, or follow us on Twitter! Our developers are always eager to chat with you, and The Graph ecosystem has a growing community of developers working to build the decentralized future.

The Graph Raises $5M From Strategic Investors to Decentralize the Query Layer of DeFi and Web3 was originally published in The Graph on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Graph is excited to announce an integration with Chainlink, the market-leading decentralized oracle network. The integration will allow indexed data from The Graph’s APIs, called subgraphs, to be relayed to smart contracts via Chainlink oracles. This opens up opportunities for developers to use indexed data sets to build powerful, truly decentralized applications.

Below are three use cases where developers can use Chainlink oracles to access subgraphs on-chain to augment the value of their decentralized application:

• Using a subgraph to catalog on-chain liquidity to calculate and compare slippage of potential trades made on a DEX and other DeFi applications
• Using a subgraph to catalog the average gas consumed per block for each transaction to calculate recommended gas fees
• Using subgraphs as APIs for integrating global, real-world (off-chain) data into dApps such as gaming results, user identities, off-chain financial assets and more

Synthetix is an example of a DeFi dApp that combines the best of middleware protocols: using Chainlink oracles for price feeds and powering their exchange UI using a subgraph. This integration is the start of an expansion in middleware protocols that seamlessly integrate, providing the necessary infrastructure to build truly serverless and decentralized applications.

The Graph: Building Open APIs for Web3

Indexing is a way of structuring and categorizing data so it can be easily searched for and queried by users. Google is a famous example of indexing web data, substantially decreasing the time it takes for users to find and use information on the Internet. Without data indexing, users would need to manually scroll through unorganized data stores filled with raw and unmapped data to find the information they need.

Blockchains are increasingly becoming data-rich environments, both through data generation activities on-chain (smart contract events and calls) and through dApps bringing external data on-chain via oracles. All dApps that show blockchain data in their UIs require indexed data to reference the information they need and create good user experiences.

Before The Graph, developers had to write their own indexing code and maintain servers and databases on centralized infrastructure. This introduces a central point of failure; the indexed data can be maliciously or mistakenly manipulated by the dApp or the single server can go offline. Furthermore, developers have to spend extra time and money to run the infrastructure themselves. Deploying a subgraph is the most efficient way for developers to index blockchain data.

The Graph solves the problem of centralized data indexing by building a decentralized protocol for indexing blockchain data. Today subgraphs can be deployed to The Graph’s hosted service and a decentralized network will be launching later this year. This will ensure that data remains open and that dApps continue to run no matter what.

With the decentralized network, users will no longer have to trust teams to operate servers and developers can deploy to reliable public infrastructure they don’t have to manage. The Graph uses GraphQL, an open-source query language widely used by the web developer community. It provides a powerful API to get exactly the data users need in a single request, seamlessly traversing and combining data sources. GraphQL makes it easy for Web2 developers to build in Web3.

Chainlink: Bridging Indexed Data with Smart Contracts

Blockchain activity alone produces several valuable on-chain data sets that are increasingly attractive for use in decentralized applications. While the raw data may not be as useful for a dApp, the indexed and compiled data can be. Most data presented in a dApp UI (eg. user balances, digital art, votes) is blockchain data indexed by The Graph. Useful indexed data includes gas data to determine the recommended gas fee, block times to determine the average block time, a DEX’s on-chain liquidity to calculate slippage, and much more.

Broadcasting off-chain data and storing it on-chain is another important area where data indexing becomes useful. For example, deploying a subgraph that includes the schema and manifest for consuming blockchain data can be useful for analyzing historical data, such as determining the quality of an oracle node based on past response time to a price data query, the accuracy of those responses, the number of jobs completed, and more.

The next important feature is making data indexed by The Graph available to smart contracts via secure and reliable oracles. Chainlink is a framework for building decentralized oracle networks that is critical to data sharing between decentralized applications. It allows users to decentralize both the node operator and data source of an oracle network, as well as incorporate advanced features such as trusted execution environments and verifiable randomness. Being the most widely used oracle network across an increasing number of different blockchains, Chainlink oracles make for a natural combination with The Graph for dApps across blockchain environments to index data and deliver that data to smart contracts.

All subgraphs are potential data sources for Chainlink oracles that can feed into a smart contract to trigger execution or feed into off-chain computation protocols. Access to subgraphs enables more data-rich oracles. Smart contracts can also use Chainlink oracles to trigger the indexing of data on The Graph.

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 create an index that catalogs gas prices paid per transaction. dApps can reference this Gas Station API via Chainlink to calculate the recommended gas price. Finally, there are plans to develop a universal API to allow smart contracts access to any subgraph using a Chainlink decentralized oracle network. Thus, developers can index real-world data and use it in their smart contracts, such as gaming results, user profiles, and more.

Some initial work on integrating Chainlink and The Graph was also done by a team at ETHBerlin Zwei hackathon. The Graph Oracle allows smart contracts to run queries on The Graph and have the results posted back to the smart contracts.

Seeding Middleware Infrastructure for Accelerated Smart Contract Development

We have already seen the creation of several stand-alone applications that either function completely on-chain, or use oracles to enhance their ability to produce value for users. In our opinion, smart contract technology has only scratched the surface of its potential due to a lack of decentralized middleware infrastructure. This is rapidly changing, as the tools available to developers outside of the base layer are growing, including The Graph for indexing and querying data, Chainlink for oracles, Ceramic for storing data, LivePeer for video streaming, Unstoppable Domains for web hosting, and many more. Together, these middleware protocols will make developing a smart contract substantially easier, while providing access to more functionality.

“We’re thrilled to collaborate with Chainlink to bring a vast amount of new blockchain datasets to developers, augmenting the value of their decentralized applications. Through The Graph, developers can start cataloging important blockchain data, such as gas prices and slippage, and securely relay them to their dApps using Chainlink oracles. This brings end-to-end decentralization of data indexing and data retrieval, a critical step in abstracting complexity to allow for more advanced dApp development.” — Yaniv Tal, Co-founder at The Graph

About Chainlink

If you’re a developer and want to connect your smart contract to existing data and infrastructure outside the underlying blockchain, reach out to them here. They can help you quickly and securely launch your data-enabled application or Chainlink Price Reference Data Contract on mainnet today. You can also visit the developer documentation or join the technical discussion on Discord. Learn more by visiting the Chainlink website or follow them on Twitter or Reddit.

Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network that enables smart contracts to securely access off-chain data feeds, web APIs, and traditional bank payments. It is well known for providing highly secure and reliable oracles to large enterprises (Google, Oracle, and SWIFT) and leading smart contract development teams such as Polkadot/Substrate, Synthetix, Loopring, Aave, OpenLaw, Conflux, and many others.

About The Graph

The Graph is the indexing and query layer of the decentralized web. Developers build and publish open APIs, called subgraphs, that applications can query using GraphQL. There is a hosted service in production that makes it really easy for developers to get started building on The Graph and the decentralized network will be launching later this year. The Graph currently supports indexing data from Ethereum, PoA, and IPFS, with more networks coming soon. To date, over 1,500 subgraphs have been deployed by over 1,400 developers, for dApps like Uniswap, Synthetix, Aragon, AAVE, Gnosis, Balancer, Livepeer, DAOstack, AAVE, Decentraland and many others.

If you’re a developer building a dApp or Web3 application, use subgraphs for indexing and querying data from blockchains! The Graph allows dApps to efficiently and performantly present data in a UI and lets other developers use your subgraph too! You can deploy a subgraph or query existing subgraphs that can be found in the Graph Explorer. Join our community by introducing yourself in our Discord for technical discussion, join our Telegramchat or follow us on Twitter! Our developers are always eager to chat with you and The Graph ecosystem has a growing community of developers that support each other.

Official Blog Post found Using this link

Bringing Indexed Data from The Graph to Smart Contracts with Chainlink Oracles was originally published in The Graph on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over the last month, I have traveled throughout Europe to many different conferences, many focused on industries outside of the blockchain space. Interestingly enough, blockchain was still at the forefront of many of the conversations and presentations. I find it interesting that, as we watch the cryptocurrency market approach new floors since the top of the market, blockchain is being discussed as a industry changing technology now more than it ever has. Blockchain is becoming understood more and more each day and more widely adopted.

A lot of my friends that were early adopters of Bitcoin were introduced to cryptocurrency through the gaming space, either though the idea of a digital currency within the game or through selling their items to other players and needing a cheaper alternative to the traditional banking methods (ex. PayPal or wires). Thus, I was excited to attend the mobile gaming conference in London, where an entire segment of the conference was dedicated to the blockchain space. In the gaming space, they were most excited about non-fungible tokens (ERC-721) that give the players the ability to own and sell their digital items, micropayments that allow players to contribute directly towards developers work as well as parallel gaming universes that allow you to use the same character and items across a magnitude of games. The gaming space has and continues to stand as the forefront example of disruption through blockchain technology.

In Davos, blockchain was, again, the main topic of conversation outside of the WEF. At each event I attended, blockchain was the main topic of discussion. At Blockbase, many presenters spoke about their interest in bringing art into blockchain. Price was discussed among my investor friends and many seem bearish over the next 6 months to 3 years. It is fascinating that the price is at all time lows since the hype of 2017, yet the infrastructure is much more built out and projects have much more developed products. Many projects are watching and waiting for the market to ramp back up before releasing their token into the market. It will be interesting to see how many more projects die off and how many projects saturate the market with their new coin as the market picks back up.

The last conference I attended was Aracon in Berlin, the home of blockchain development. I found the quality of this conference similar to the Web3 Summit, which was one of the top conferences I have ever attended in the blockchain space. It might be the Berlin air, but something about this place draws some of the top minds in the space. One feeling I couldn’t help but to have during this conference is how we might be getting ahead of ourselves in terms of what we are choosing to do with the technology. Incredible things are being built for the future, but if we do not take a step back, the future may never come. There needs to be more of a focus on usability, scalability and true decentralization.

I am now off to the Netherlands to attend the Deep Dive for the Odyssey Hackathon, where Nature 2.0 will be presenting at 1pm on Tuesday, February 5th. Give me a shout if you are around or if you want to learn more about the hackathon coming up in April.