The Graph’s Sunrise of Decentralized Data 🌅
What newbies need to know about the recent announcement.
The Graph is marking a major milestone in its journey towards full decentralization by sunsetting its free hosted service for subgraphs. This transition empowers developers and the entire web3 ecosystem by ensuring data autonomy and decentralization.
What was the hosted service?
In 2018, The Graph initially used a hosted service as a temporary scaffold while architecting a decentralized protocol to serve web3’s data needs. Now, The Graph is leaving behind its hosted service “training wheels” and expanding web3’s potential by serving as its decentralized data layer. This empowers all dApps to decentralize their data pipelines by offloading their data needs, such as the cost of running physical infrastructure or overhead in maintaining databases, to The Graph’s decentralized network.
What exactly does sunrise of hosted mean, and how does this affect me as a delegator?
The hosted service was initially introduced as a bootstrapping mechanism, allowing customers to deploy subgraphs and query blockchain information for free. This service was never intended to be a long-term solution but rather a way to familiarize the masses with accessing blockchain information for their applications, without worrying about costs. Now, users need to migrate their subgraphs from the hosted service and pay per query to use The Graph on the decentralized service.
This implementation changes the ecosystem dynamics. Indexers are compensated through inflation rewards (increasing token supply) and will now also earn query fees as a secondary income stream. If query fees become sufficiently high, they could eventually replace some or all of inflation rewards. As a delegator, you will receive a portion of these query fees, which indexers distribute according to the percentage they set.
For more in-depth details on how this works, please see our blog below:
Sharing Some Numbers
During the Sunrise of Decentralized Data, The Graph Network experienced an 11x growth in query volume to 991 million queries over the last thirty days, compared with 89.8 million queries over the same period in 2023. Additionally, data service fees for both subgraphs and Substreams surged by 376% year-over-year over the past thirty-day period, demonstrating web3’s growing adoption of The Graph’s decentralized services.
Empowering Developers
So what is driving this surge in usage of the decentralized network? Well, one reason is that The Graph Network reduces the need for costly physical infrastructure and database maintenance, allowing developers to focus on building innovative applications. The Graph’s open network is permissionless, ensuring that anyone can access and build on it without barriers.
The following are some useful bits of information for developers:
- You may not need to develop a subgraph because over 6,000 subgraphs, including notable projects like AAVE, Balancer, ENS, and SushiSwap, have migrated to The Graph Network.
- As a developer you get 100,000 free queries per month
- Beyond this, query fees are charged, promoting efficient use of resources. These fees work out to just $4 per additional 100,000 queries
Benefits of Decentralization
The Graph’s global network of 100+ independent Indexers manages the indexing and querying of subgraphs, democratizing access and ensuring the integrity of blockchain data across the industry. This decentralized system is secured by time-tested protocol economics and is constantly evolving through governance. This model allows web3 developers to build with confidence, knowing they are leveraging a data layer that can scale to meet the growing demands of the industry. Some benefits are:
- Improved security, reliability, and resistance to attacks.
- Democratized data access without reliance on a single Indexer or point of failure.
- Enhanced performance with fast syncing, reliable uptime, and global redundancy.
Conclusion
The Graph revolutionized blockchain data since its inception in 2018 by introducing and standardizing subgraphs as the way web3 accesses data. The transition to a fully decentralized network fulfills the original vision of providing the web3 ecosystem with a reliable, efficient, and secure decentralized data layer.
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Do you have any questions?
Graphtronauts is the largest, unofficial community for long-term GRT holders who believe in The Graph’s web3 vision for the future. Our goal is to educate the broader crypto community and help them become contributing members within The Graph ecosystem.
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Graphtronauts Indexer is live on The Graph!
You can read our official launch announcement here.
If you want to delegate to us, you can go directly in Graph Explorer, using the link here.
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