Edge & Node’s August/September Update

Research & Development Core Team Updates
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:woman_astronaut: Executive Summary

At Edge & Node, we’re on a mission to empower the world via web3 and make blockchain data readily available to all. In August, we’ve made massive strides in scaling on L2, working on key projects for the Sunrise of decentralized data, and revamping billing, to name a few initiatives. Our north star remains the same: to upgrade all of the hosted service traffic to the decentralized network as seamlessly and quickly as possible.

Notable August Accomplishments:

  • L2 Transfer Tools are live! Welcome to a world of significantly lower transaction fees on web3. You can now move subgraphs, delegation, signal, and self-stake from The Graph Network on Ethereum to The Graph Network on Arbitrum. Scaling on L2 has been a colossal journey of nearly 10 months, covering milestones such as:
    • Enabling billing on Arbitrum last year
    • Launching protocol smart contracts on L2 at the beginning of the year
    • Enabling indexing rewards on L2 in the Spring of 2023
    • Culminating in the launch of these L2 Transfer Tools - learn more about it here.
  • On the topic of billing improvements, early adopters can now try out a flat rate plan for data consumption on The Graph Network. If you are interested in learning more about The Graph Subscriptions in beta, check out the beta documentation. As always, we welcome feedback on the billing experience, so feel free to **send us an email.**
  • The Sunrise of Decentralized Data: A major mark of progress towards the Sunrise is in the creation of an “upgrade Indexer”. The same battled-tested and highly scalable infrastructure that’s been used to serve over one trillion queries since its launch in 2019 will soon help facilitate upgrades of all hosted service subgraphs to The Graph Network. The upgrade Indexer is a temporary solution for helping existing users of the hosted service upgrade their subgraphs to The Graph Network, while also functioning as a fallback for subgraph queries that cannot be handled by other Indexers in the network. Edge & Node’s upgrade Indexer will allocate only the minimum amount per subgraph and will not be collecting indexing rewards, only query fees for queries served. All
    • If you would like to review the draft of the Sunrise plans with us and provide feedback, please get in touch.
    • We welcome all Indexers to join the process of facilitating network upgrades, so we will publicly share the list of chains and subgraphs that the upgrade Indexer will support ahead of time.

The work doesn’t stop there — Edge & Node is executing on top-level strategic initiatives across the following categories:

1. The Sunrise of Decentralized Data

  • The adoption of The Graph Network is speeding up. During the month of August we saw the highest amount of upgrades in The Graph Network’s history! In August alone, 35 subgraphs were published to The Graph’s decentralized network. One of which generates over 1 million daily queries. The GRT query fees are flowing due to usage on The Graph Network.
    • In addition, developers behind 33 subgraphs committed to upgrading to the network, while 20 grants have been dispersed for previous upgrade commitments.
  • We are working towards the implementation of a free plan as part of The Graph Network’s billing experience, which would enable a limited amount of free queries from select gateways on The Graph Network each month. This free plan would preserve and enhance The Graph’s ability to support projects through their incubation phases, helping grow a large and crucial part of the web3 ecosystem.

2. Focusing on improving the experience for network participants

  • When we launched The Graph Network the L2s were not yet ready. As web3 has innovated and adapted, so have we. Among the biggest news for network participant experience enhancement is the widespread availability of The Graph on Arbitrum. Now it’s easier than ever for any network participant to take advantage of the significantly cheaper fees on Arbitrum. Welcome to transactions that are orders of magnitude cheaper. Among the Arbitrum updates:
    • With the release of L2 Transfer Tools, the Graph Explorer UI now autodetects your stake and shows your possible actions for moving to L2.
    • A new network subgraph was synced and now available that includes the data of L2 transfer actions.
    • We updated the subscription system contracts to use the new native Arbitrum USDC launched by Circle.
  • Support on The Graph Network has improved. Last month we rolled out a participant-focused incident management policy. This month we took it one step further and began coordinating ecosystem-wide support amongst all the core dev teams (plus Subgraph Guardians of course). We want everyone’s support experience on The Graph to be unrivaled.

3. Empowering the wider ecosystem of The Graph

Other accomplishments this month

HOUSE OF WEB3

  • The art at the House of Web3 has leveled up, focusing more on the community with a collaboration between Gabe Weiss and our House of Web3 co-creators. Who says NFTs can only be digital?
  • The Podcast & Studio Room is ready for production! If you are interested in launching or recording a podcast at the House of Web3, reach out at hello@thehouseofweb3.com
  • Launched a recurring in-house Usability Testing session for co-creators to further collaborate, iterate, and provide feedback on each other’s businesses and projects
  • Collaborated with NEAR Foundation and Flipside to co-sponsor community happy hours
  • Hosted a high-level Women in Web3 founder and developer meetup with over 50 women in attendance
  • Co-sponsored Stanford Blockchain Kick-off party with over 200 in attendance, along with not just one, but two closing parties for Stanford Blockchain Week!

DEVELOPER RELATIONS

MARKETING

What’s Next

We continue working towards the Sunrise of Decentralized Data:

  • Working towards having a running upgrade Indexer to support The Sunrise
  • Continuing the engineering work to upgrade all of the hosted traffic onto the network with the sunrise
  • With the expected increase of Arbitrum indexing rewards to 25%, we will continue to encourage people to publish their subgraphs directly from the Studio to Arbitrum in order to leverage the benefits of L2 scaling. We also encourage use of the transfer tools if your participation so far has been on L1.
  • Finalize the processes and roadmaps for other L1 and L2 blockchains to integrate with The Graph
  • Begin opening up The Graph Subscriptions beta for more users, and provide a plan that includes bundled curation and queries.
  • Continue working with the 100+ dapps that have committed to upgrade to help them leverage the network. We aim to help upgrade at least 20 more subgraphs upgraded to the decentralized network, of which we expect at least two more to have over 1M+ daily volume

We continue collaborating on improvements to The Graph Network:

  • Launch Exponential Rebates as the new query fee cut mechanism, planned in two phases. Stage 1 is targeted for September 7th and Stage 2 for September 14th - details on GIP-0051.
  • Work on a withdraw to L1 user interface for vesting contracts and iterate on UI/design details based on feedback.
  • Publish a first draft of The Graph Horizon GIP (a GIP outlining a parallel protocol built on The Graph to enable improved economics and use cases) including Flat Indexing Rewards, and new data services beyond traditional subgraphs.
  • Engage the Indexer community about GIP-0058 Replacing Bonding Curves with Indexing Fees “DIPs” and incorporate feedback to clean up the path for working on a first implementation.
  • Continue our work integrating the TAP payment system to the Gateway.
  • Propose GIPs to reduce friction points of using the network such as disabling the subgraph owner tax, and allowing to close allocations under an epoch.
  • Continue development of billing improvements such as the subscriptions notification system and recurrent payments.

We have set additional goals in the following categories:

PRODUCT MARKETING

  • Update the community on additional progress made towards the Sunrise of decentralized data, along with an updated rollout plan.
  • Ship more educational resources on using L2 Transfer Tools, for every participant type
  • Draft resources and documentation educating about Arweave files as a new file data source available in an upcoming graph-node release, along with more resources on IPFS file data sources
  • Publish a Forum post explaining the effects of Exponential Rebates to Indexers after GIP-0051 goes into effect

DEVELOPER RELATIONS

  • Look forward to a blog post on Best practices in Subgraph Development: Avoiding big arrays
  • We are interviewing HOPR for Devs On The Graph. Building on The Graph and interested in joining an interview? Reach out to marcus@edgeandnode.com
  • Members of the dev rel team are attending: ETHAccra, DappCon, Rust Conference, ETH Chicago, GraphQL Conf SF, Messari Mainnet, and ETHGlobal New York.
  • Graph Builders Office Hours to look forward to…
    • Episode #09 - Alex from StreamingFast covering Substream powered subgraphs (9/14)
    • Episode #10 - Kent Fourie on Dynamic File Data Sources, multiple inputs OR Cron jobs, BlockHandlers, Games (9/21)
    • Episode #11 - Dylan Melotik on an overview for Messari Subgraphs (9/28)

A very warm welcome to all the new faces - if you aren’t yet participating in The Graph Network, we invite you to! Efforts on both the DevRel and Business Development fronts have supercharged network upgrade efforts thanks to talks, workshops, panels, and countless partner meetings.

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