Edge & Node March/April 2023 Update

Research & Development Core Team Updates
1

:woman_astronaut: Exec summary

This past month, Edge & Node made tremendous progress against major goals for H1, in particular making meaningful headway against hosted service infrastructure costs and unblocking the decentralized network experience in major ways.

Major accomplishments include:

  • Reducing hosted service infrastructure costs by 50%
  • Shipping Banxa-enabled credit and debit card payments in Subgraph Studio
  • Adding zkSync Era, Polygon zkEVM , and Base to Subgraph Studio
  • Migrating 44 subgraphs in Q1 to outstrip our goal of 40 migrations

Additionally, we have made significant progress on features that aid optimized service delivery by the Edge & Node Indexer and cut costs levied by hosted service subgraphs that have fallen into rare use.

On the business side, we had a very successful month of events and hackathons which contributed directly to migrations, subgraph spotlights, workshops & consumer testimonials. Highlights among these were the Hosted Lens / AAVE event at the Edge & Node House of Web3, Game Developer Conference events, and a podcast about decentralizing a Fortune 500 company.

More detailed updates can be found below, lining up with our tracks to support our top-level strategic initiatives.

Looking back (what was delivered)

1. Edge & Node running an active Indexer in the network:

2. Reducing infrastructure costs in hosted service and subgraph studio:

  • Reduced the cost of hosted service infrastructure by 50%
    • Successfully reduced RPC infrastructure usage from 12B CUs/day to ~30-50M CUs/day
    • Fully deployed Firehose/EVMX for Mainnet and Goerli in staging and production
    • Ethereum RPC cost is trending towards zero now
    • Firehose testing for Polygon and BNB Chain has started
    • Removed 4 unused Kubernetes nodes and a few unneeded Indexer clusters
    • Continue to evaluate IBM/Equinix as potential alternative cloud storage provider.
  • Test-ran two features:
    • The automated deletion of subgraphs that have fallen into disuse on the hosted service
    • The automated pruning of subgraphs to take up less space with historical data
  • Downsized subgraph logging infrastructure and set up OpenCost for better insights into infrastructure cost
  • Onboarded database admin contractors to focus on cost cutting improvements and feasibility of self-hosted Postgres databases.

3. Unblocking decentralized network go-to-market:

  • Shipped Banxa-enabled credit card payments on The Graph Network!
    • The Block Press , marketing on Forum, Discord, Twitter+ and PR
    • Moderated a Twitter Space with Banxa CPO, Banxa Head of Growth, and E&N R&D participants
  • Exceeded our goal of 40 subgraphs migrated in Q1 (we are now at 44 of which 24 subgraphs migrated in February)
    • Migrated three 1M+ daily vol subgraphs
  • Added zkSync Era, Polygon zkEVM , and Base to Subgraph Studio
  • Built awareness re. the launch of file data sources with Graph Node v0.30
  • Worked with The Graph Foundation & Polygon to build awareness about Polygon coming to the network
  • Improved UX re. GRT withdrawal to Polygon and Arbitrum within Binance

Other accomplishments this month

  • On the business side, we hosted several impactful events
    • Hosted Lens / AAVE event at the Edge & Node House of Web3
    • Hosted Crypto Underground on ZKPs at the Edge & Node House of Web3
    • ā€œHow to Decentralize a Fortune 500 Companyā€ The Defiant episode published
  • Recorded a podcast with Fuse Network
  • Shipped Developer Newsletter #2
  • Launched Stage 1 of The Graph website redesign - going live shortly with additional updates
  • Held 23 events at the House of Web 3 in March
    • Included Game Developer Conference week events:
      • Merging The Metaverse - 50 in attendance
      • Web3 Gaming Apps Powered by Gnolang - workshop led by Cosmos co-founder Jae Kwon - 45 in attendance
      • An Open Source Odyssey with ChainSafe Gaming - 60 attendance
      • NFTs: Moving from Speculation to Utility with SKALE Labs on 03/29
      • Art & Web3 on 03/30
  • Completed Subgraph Spotlights
    • 0x Protocol, Request Network, Tellor, Nama Finance, Oceanpoint, DODO
  • Graph Node
    • Implemented subgraph failure retry fuzzing
    • Implemented loading derived fields into mappings
    • Improved metrics for outgoing provider calls
    • Merged support for and/or filters and nested sorting (worked on by The Guild)

Looking ahead (upcoming priorities)

  • Post GIP draft for exponential rebates
  • Determine timeline (working with Graph Council) for enabling indexing rewards on Arbitrum Graph
  • Develop a tool to do POI cross-checking and debugging dashboard, for eventual public availability
  • Continue to refine managing allocations and Delegators on E&Nā€™s Indexer and develop a custom swapping algorithm for optimizing Indexer allocations.
  • On the business side
    • New (higher) subgraph migrations goal from 40 to 45 for Q2
      • Get at least one more 1M+ daily vol subgraph migrated in April
    • Deepen partnerships in pursuit of more Firehose integrations and more chains
    • Evangelize The Graph Network scaling on L2 with Arbitrum
    • Have a sizeable presence at EthTokyo
    • Organize a panel to discuss open-source infra
    • There will be an event at the House of Web3 once the protocol completes full Arbitrum migration
    • Begin education on substream-powered subgraphs
4 Likes