The Graph Forum

Here is a plot showing the GRT circulation over 5 years from the launch date (i.e., December 17, 2020 at 6:00 PM):

Indexers who helped during the testnet phase also received a reward in the form of GRT equivalent to $10,000 to as much as $100,000<security:.

GRT:> Staking

In order for users to purchase shares in the nodes that run the entire platform and sell their services on the "query market," they must stake their GRT. In return, they receive financial rewards. If the indexers are malicious and, for example, intentionally modify data, this is punished expensively in the form of taking away their staked GRT tokens.

Already 2,300 Subgraphs Support the Growing Network

Recently, The Graph has been able to support indexing of data originating from Ethereum, IPFS, and PoA networks. There are more networks that the platform will support in the future. Currently, more than 2,300 subgraphs have already been deployed and developers are using them for applications. Some of these applications include Aave, Aragon, Balancer (BAL), DAOstack, Uniswap, Synthetix (SNX), and many others.

There is a lot of institutional support for The Graph (GRT) network. Michael Anderson of Framework Ventures, said in a press release that they "couldn't be happier to support Yaniv and the team. According to his statement, they look forward to helping the decentralized network and its growth.

Hayden Adams of Uniswap also shared how useful the platform has been for their analytic needs and highlights the need for The Graph's use case:

As a company, we don't manage or run our own databases. ... Right now, it's pretty difficult to get historical data from the Ethereum blockchain in an efficient way.

The Graph's long-term plan, in addition to expanding to other blockchains soon, is to transfer ownership and management of the platform to the community. This is also in response to the shift of many blockchain applications to a decentralized model of governance.

Key roles of the platform

The overall ecosystem of the platform is composed of the following individuals:

Consumers - These are the users who pay Indexer for their searches. They can also be web services or any other software connected to The Graph.

Indexers - These are the nodes that maintain the indexing function of the platform.

Curator - Using GRTs, the curators for the subgraphs identify the information that is valuable to the platform's index.

Delegator - These are other stakers who delegate their GRT to existing indexers and earn a portion of the rewards.

Fishermen - They verify that the network's response to queries is correct.

Arbitrator - They decide whether an indexer is malicious or not.

The Graph Council

The Graph plans to decentralize its management in the future. This will most likely be similar to MakerDAO and Compound (COMP). Once the protocol is ready, the team plans to create a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) that will allow core stakeholders to participate in key protocol decisions.

Similar to other DAOs, The Graph Council, which will be the governing body for the technical parameters of the protocol, will also be responsible for how The Graph Foundation allocates its native utility tokens GRT.

Its basic functions include grant allocation and ecosystem funding decisions, protocol upgrades, protocol parameters, and other emergency decisions.

The Graph Token (GRT)

The Graph Token, or $GRT, is its native ERC-20-based token that can serve as a medium of exchange and a reward for community participants who act as indexers, curators, and delegators

GRT also have a vesting and distribution schedule that ranges from 6 months to 10 years. It is expected that approximately 12.5% of the total token supply (i.e., 1,224,999,438 GRT) will be in circulation at launch. However, this figure is exclusive of operational but locked tokens.

GRT token distribution at mainnet launch.

The Graph launched its mainnet on December 17, 2020, at 6:00 p.m. German time. At the launch, GRT were distributed to all participants in the public sale. Members of The Graph's curator program also received rewards worth an initial $1,000, with the remainder distributed to them quarterly based on their contributions to the program.

The Graph Foundation also received approximately 20% of the offering of all GRT tokens for future development of the project. In particular, contributors who want to help in the further development of The Graph can apply for their rewards program. Approximately 1% of the total GRT supply will be allocated to support these contributors in 2021.

GraphQL is the link between the blockchain data and the application a user wants to feed it to. Finally, after the whole process, users can view the results of their query from within their applications.

Basically, this is how the cycle of data query and indexing works in the platform. Users can refer to Graph Explorer to browse the subgraphs that already exist in the platform. Each of these subgraphs has a playground where users can perform queries using GraphQL.

How does The Graph work?

To index Ethereum-based data, The Graph uses the "subgraph manifest." This refers to the description of a subgraph that contains data about smart contracts, blockchain events, and the process of mapping event data together before it is all stored in the platform's database.

Backstory

Yaniv Tal, co-founder and CEO of The Graph, worked with his team to develop an indexing protocol to make blockchain data easier to access. Tal and his co-founders had experienced firsthand how difficult it was to create new applications on the Ethereum blockchain.

Thanks to their experience with applications, they found out that there was actually no decentralized indexing and querying software for blockchain yet. The problem at that time was that developers had to find their own way to collect and transform data from different sources.

The mission of the platform Tal and his team have developed is to create applications that don't require servers and make Web3 accessible to everyone

What is The Graph?

The Graph (GRT) is a decentralized and open source indexing protocol for blockchain data. Developers can build and publish various APIs called subgraphs that perform queries over the GraphQL. We'll explain what a GraphQL is good for later.

The platform can be used to conveniently search for any Ethereum data through simple queries. This addresses the common problem that many other blockchain indexing platforms have.

Blockchain applications struggle to adhere to properties such as finality, chain reorganization, and query fulfillment security. The Graph aims to remedy this and other problems.

Through "subgraphs," The Graph indexes blockchain data that users can access through the GraphQL API. According to the team, they will fully decentralize it in the future. More nodes will be involved and made responsible for maintaining the index.

Interest in the platform continues to grow. In fact, they reached over one billion queries last June 2020. That was right at the time when decentralized finance was also gaining a lot of institutional attention.

Key contributors from around the world are expanding The Graph and driving the protocol's R&D roadmap to realize web3's decentralized vision.

Today, The Graph Foundation is excited to share this collaborative R&D roadmap with the community 🧑‍🚀!

Today, The Graph Foundation is pleased to unveil The Graph R&D Roadmap , a collaborative plan implemented by contributors from around the world, including Edge & Node, StreamingFast, Figment, The Guild, Semiotic AI, GraphOps, LimeChain, BlockScience, Prysm Group, and other independent researchers. This roadmap is based on years of research and design across multiple teams to improve The Graph Network and meet the data needs of DApp developers and consumers.

Developments described in this roadmap include: significant improvements to indexing performance and streaming architecture with Firehose , new data sources and chain support, work on a SNARK proof for scalable state channels and verifiable queries, upgrades to delegator and curator mechanisms, Layer 2 scaling, more gateways, improvements to the Subgraph developer experience, optimizations to the indexer tools, and much more! In addition, some of the milestones in this roadmap will allow Ethereum Dapp developers to access historical data after implementing the Ethereum client upgrade EIP-4444