summary: The Graph is a decentralized query protocol for indexing and organizing data from blockchains and storage networks.
content: The Graph is a decentralized query protocol for indexing and organizing data from blockchains and storage networks. The Graph operates a hosted service that deploys subgraphs for Web3 and DeFi applications built on multi-chains such as Ethereum, IPFS, POA, Celo, Polygon, Polkadot, and more. In October 2020, prior to its mainnet's launch, the team announced the creation of The Graph Foundation, an independent organizational structure that will support the vibrance and diversity of The Graph’s ecosystem. Eva Beylin was also announced as the director of The Graph Foundation. On December 17, 2020, The Graph announced its mainnet launch. The price of The Graph (GRT) token soared more than 425% on Coinbase Pro in three days following its mainnet launch. Trading volumes also spiked from $880 million to $2.8 billion during that period. GRT reached a market cap of over $929 million in four days following the launch. The mainnet launch also came with the deployment of The Graph Network contracts on Ethereum mainnet, the deployment of the GRT contract, the distribution of GRT tokens to stakeholders, and the launch of The Bug Bounty Program. On February 18, 2021, The Graph announced its further expansion to additional projects by integrating the Polkadot, NEAR, Solana, and Celo Layer 1 Blockchains, opening Web3 opportunities to a wider ecosystem. As of March 2022, The Graph has deployed over 22,000 subgraphs and has over 2,000 curators, 7000 delegators, and 160 indexers. History The idea of The Graph was born in late 2017 and introduced in the summer of 2018 by Yaniv Tal, Jannis Pohlmann, and Brandon Ramirez. The three of them had previously collaborated on a number of startup projects focused on software development. They wanted to make it easier for developers to build sophisticated software. In 2017 the trio was introduced to Ethereum which quickly sparked their interest and made them start building dApps. !LWQAHPRAPZEBLINCBOYSHQ4CUI.jpgThe Graph co-founders, left to right: Jannis Pohlmann, Brandon Ramirez, Yaniv Tal. Since January 2019, The Graph has been providing a hosted service with more than 2,900 subgraphs for Web3 and DeFi apps. The idea of the Graph ecosystem was conceived and developed by Graph Protocol Incorporation, which was later renamed Edge & Node. Further in 2020, The Graph Foundation was also founded to support the diverse network and the various network participants. Speaking about its launch, Project Lead and Co-founder of The Graph, Yaniv Tal says: It's surreal that after years of hard work, our vision for a global decentralized indexing and API layer for Web3 has become real. We really believe in decentralization and the launch of The Graph Network is a major milestone for enabling humans to cooperate and organize in a decentralized way. The Graph is already being used by so many great projects in DeFi and Web3 and with this new network, the crypto community can work together with powerful incentives to take on the traditional tech and financial sectors, to create better systems for allocating resources and creating economic opportunity. Overview The first prototype of The Graph was built by its founders in late 2017. In January 2019, the team launched their Hosted Service and Graph Explorer. The team also announced seven launch partners: Dharma, Compound, Uniswap, Ethereum Name Service, Origin Protocol, Decentraland, and Livepeer. All these protocols became available on The Graph for third-party developers to access. As of July 2020, The Graph has grown from seven launch partners to hundreds of applications including Synthetix, Uniswap, Gnosis, Aragon, Livepeer, Melonport AG, 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 hosted service processed 50 million queries per day and boasted over 750 million queries in May 2020, up 45% from April 2020. On July 27, 2020, The Graph team announced the launch of 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 the mainnet launch. Over 15 node operators, including Figment Networks, Staking Facilities, Certus One, Staked, Chorus One, and Bloq, entered the mission control center by pre-registering for the testnet. The Graph learns what and how to index Ethereum data based on subgraph descriptions, known as the subgraph manifest. The subgraph description defines the smart contracts of interest for a subgraph, the events in those contracts to pay attention to, and how to map event data to data that The Graph will store in its database. Once a user has written a subgraph manifest, they use Graph CLI to store the definition in IPFS and tell the hosted service to start indexing data for that subgraph. On September 17, 2020, The Graph announced the launch of its Curator Program. Preregistered curators on The Graph Network included CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, Messari, Delphi Digital, Zapper, Synthetix, Pool Together, LivePeer, mStable, and Balancer. The program made it easy for curators to easily track the DeFi markets on Ethereum and always be on the lookout for new market data that is useful for their users. On December 17, 2020, The Graph announced the launch of its mainnet. Soon after the Graph network went live Coinbase Pro and Binance announced support for the Ethereum token. Coinbase Pro also noted that it had started accepting inbound orders for GRT tokens and that it would start trading the following week due to the availability of sufficient liquidity. A number of other cryptocurrency exchanges added GRT to their list of offerings. Aside from Coinbase Pro and Binance, KuCoin, OKEx, and Kraken are the other exchanges allowing trading of the GRT token. In three days since the launch, the price of The Graph token (GRT) more than doubled from $0.26 to $0.61. Volumes too spiked from $880 million to $2.8 billion. With the wide exposure of GRT on cryptocurrency exchanges, the price of the token exploded, rising more than 49% in 24 hours and giving The Graph a market value in excess of $750 million. Integrations On February 16, 2021, The Graph announced the support for Polygon, a side chain for Ethereum on The Graph’s hosted service. This commenced The Graph’s expansion from applications on Ethereum to Layer 2 scaling solutions that now include side chains, as well as indexing and querying to Polygon to make it easier for developers to build dApps on Polygon. On February 18, 2021, The Graph announced that in addition to Ethereum and IPFS, they have integrated the Polkadot, NEAR, Solana, and Celo Layer 1 Blockchains as additional supports to the protocol, opening Web3 opportunities to a wider ecosystem. Third-party developers on these chains also became eligible for The Graph Foundation grants. On June 7, 2021, The Graph Foundation announced that Arbitrum had integrated with The Graph and is live on the hosted service. The integration is a continuation of The Graph's expansion efforts to scale Web3. On June 18, 2021, The Graph announced its partnership with Optimism, an Ethereum L2 scaling solution that uses optimistic rollups to achieve lower fees, latency, and greater throughput while providing a world-class developer and user experience. The Graph will provide indexing and querying services to developers building on the Optimistic Ethereum L2 to help Ethereum scale. On October 26, 2021, it was announced that the NEAR network had joined The Graph’s hosted service. The integration has enabled developers to build subgraphs on the NEAR network using The Graph, allowing web3 infrastructure to support even more dApps. The integration utilizes StreamingFast’s Firehose interface, which is extendable to any blockchain. Products There are three main products of The Graph. This includes Graph Explorer, Subgraph Studio, and Hosted Service. Graph Explorer Launched in January 2019, Graph Explorer makes it possible for developers to discover all the data being indexed on The Graph and pull it into their dApps. Graph Explorer was launched with the following features: playground for discovering available data using introspection and running queries logs for viewing processed events and errors atomic updates with 0-downtime deployments dashboard for viewing your subgraphs and managing access tokens version switcher for toggling between the pending and current versions while a subgraph is being synced GitHub authentication with support for individual and organization accounts. Subgraph Studio The Subgraph Studio is a place where users can build and create subgraphs, add metadata, and publish them to the new decentralized Explorer. Users can test their subgraphs before they are published and can also restrict their API keys to specific domains to allow only certain indexers to query from their API keys. The studio has the following features: Creation of subgraphs through the Studio UI Deployment of subgraphs using the CLI Publishing subgraphs with the Studio UI Test-running in the playground Integration in staging using the query URL Creation and management of API keys for specific subgraphs Hosted Service The hosted service will be shutting down in Q1 2023 and this is to enable all web3 applications to retrieve blockchain data in a truly decentralized way. The Graph Foundation has outlined a plan and three-phase schedule to sunset the hosted service, taking another massive step into the decentralized networ