Edge & Node Jan/Feb 2023 Update

Exec Summary

Edge & Node kicked off the year strong putting our plan (described in previous update) into effect.

Specifically, we held an internal R&D virtual offsite to kick off the product and engineering planning to support execution towards these goals in Q1. We had four tracks to support top-level strategic initiatives:

  • Edge & Node running an active indexer in the network.
  • Reducing infrastructure costs in hosted service and subgraph studio.
  • Improving the billing experience in the network via decentralized gatewaays.
  • Unblocking decentralized network go-to-market.

On the billing track, we aligned on a proposal for a so-called Graph Subscription Protocol, a proposed standardized smart contract that would enable decentralized Gateway operators to integrate into the Subgraph Studio and offer business models that abstract away some of the complexity of interacting with the economics of the protocol.

On the decentralized network go-to-market (GTM) side, one risk that was identified was that two-thirds of traffic going to the hosted service is coming from private servers that are difficult to identify due to lack of any URL in the HTTP headers, which means it would be difficult to contact the sources of said traffic to help ensure a smooth migration. A decision was made to introduce a new milestone to the hosted service sunset (with plenty of lead time), where users will need to register with contact information in order to continue using the free hosted service. Another two decisions in this track:

  • Immediately begin launching all new features and chains (including experimental ones) to the Subgraph Studio first, rather than the hosted service.
  • Plan the timing of the “big push” on migration for after the protocol is live on Arbitrum so the majority of query volume that is still on the hosted service does not need to migrate twice.

On the business side, the team immediately embodied our new developer focus, both by raising the above issue around anonymous traffic, but also launching The Graph’s first developer-focused blog and newsletter. Across the company, we’re seeing much more nuanced discussion of developer needs, including the differences between the “API Creator” and “Data Consumers.” Our hypothesis is that while API Creators have been our primary focus to date, pure Data Consumers will increase in relevance to The Graph’s growth story.

Edge & Node’s business team has also continued working with the SubgraphDAO and The Graph Foundation to keep migrations rolling full-steam ahead, contributing to another record quarter of growth in The Graph’s decentralized network!

Detailed Update

R&D

Accomplishments

  • (From business team update)
    • Gnosis Multisig suported permissionlessly on mainnet
    • Polygon testing on Goerli
  • Last major PR for File Data Sources merged!
  • Added switcher to Graph Explorer for Arbitrum
  • Merged PR into Graph Node that decreases load on database by caching recent blocks in memory.
  • L2 migration progress
    • Arbitrum-Goerli testnet support added in explorer.
    • Added support for Arbitrum One and Arbitrum testnet to various network and indexer components.
    • Arbitrum-Goerli Indexers up and running
    • DataEdge contract deployed on Arbitrum for Epoch Block Oracle support
    • Implmented improved bridge subgraph including RLP encoder in AssemblyScript
  • Added support for newly announced chains (Polgyon, Optimism, Celo and Avalanche) to network and Indexer components.
  • Started work in Graph Node on load balancing Firehose requests across providers… which is currently blocking further hosted service adoption of Firehose.
  • Built dashboard and provided data for scoring to support Migration Infrastructure Providers (MIPS) program.

Up Next

  • Propose to Graph Council to reallocate small portion of indexing rewards to L2 protocol for testing.
  • Subgraph pruning (deleting historical data past a certain point)
  • Graph Subscription Protocol (GSP) testing & audit
  • MVP of Billing 2.0 (cross-gateway billing dashboard based on GSP)
  • Network data integrity dashboard (for debugging and attributing inconsistencies)
    • File Data Sources GTM

Business

Accomplishments

  • Developer newsletter and blog!
  • Helping to scale subgraph migration and grants via SubgraphDAO
  • Migration progress
    • 9 subgraphs migrated to decentralized network in Jan
      • 2 w/ 1M+ daily query volume
    • Subgraph migrations scaling via SubgraphDAO
      • 2K GRT migration bounties for SubgraphDAO members whitegloving migration of subgraphs w/ 1K-100K daily queries.
  • Launched developer blog and newsletter.
    • Simon from E&N with first post on writing more efficient mappings.
  • 5 chains have committed to integrating Firehose.
  • Helped The Graph Foundation announce 4 new chain integrations in decentralized network.
  • 7 projects publically highlighting their positive experience with The Graph’s decentralized network: Uno Farm, Phuture Finance, HOPR, Kodex, Gnosis, Art Blocks, Atrium

Up Next

  • Migration
    • Targetting 40 total migrations by end of Q1
    • Migration station at ETH Denver to get more projects migrated.
  • Build excitement around The Graph’s migration to L2
  • Publish another “Best Practices in Subgraph Development” blog post
  • Drive adoption of “Proof of Decentralization” badges for projects building on The Graph’s decentralized network.
7 Likes