Executive Summary
Edge & Node welcomes the new year propelled by the momentum of December’s achievements along with new contributions to The Graph’s New Era. An essential part of the New Era roadmap is accelerating the momentum in enabling the Sunrise of Decentralized Data, a massive milestone in the mission to make The Graph the internet’s unbreakable foundation of data. December brought us ever closer to this mission with the launch of the Upgrade Indexer — in doing so, we kicked off the Sunray phase 
. We are proud to execute on our commitments as we promised we would. Additionally, we celebrated The Graph Network’s 3rd birthday, participated in several approvals of GIPs (Graph Improvement Proposals), and gave a presentation on Horizon, an exciting proposal for future protocol iterations. Learn how Edge & Node continues to fortify the The Graph’s user experience and network adoption looking at January and beyond.
Notable December Accomplishments:
- We kicked off the Sunray phase with launching the Upgrade Indexer - kicking off phase 1 of the Sunrise of Decentralized Data
- We redesigned the plans and API keys for the billing system to use for Sunrise
- We added support on The Graph Network for Optimism Subgraphs via GGP-0036
- We welcomed 62+ new subgraphs on The Graph Network in Q4
The above list is non-exhaustive — for more details on the above and other accomplishments, below are a few categories of accomplishments along with upcoming goals.
1. Increasing Adoption of The Graph Network
- The adoption of The Graph Network continues to accelerate! With the subgraph upgrades that materialized in Q4, we now have:
- Network query volume is up about 59% month over month
- Over 1,579 subgraphs published on the decentralized network
- Of which, over 425 subgraphs have over 1,000 monthly queries
- We have continued to facilitate The Graph Network’s participants in transferring to Layer 2 via Arbitrum:
- Over 87% of all of The Graph Network’s query volume is now taking place on Arbitrum
- Since 95% of indexing rewards are now distributed on Arbitrum, with 92 Indexers having transferred a majority of their stake there, 2.1B+ GRT are now staked on Arbitrum.
2. Improving The Graph Network experience
- Bringing to fruition months of hard work, The Graph Council approved several GIPs to improve the Graph Network experience:
- GIP-56: Enable Permissionless Payers: removes the limitation of specific approved entities to pay query fees to Indexers in the network, making the query market more permissionless.
- GIP-62: Remove Delegation Parameters Cooldown: removes a rarely used parameter so that Indexers can change their delegation query fee and rewards cut with immediate effect. Indexers are already sufficiently motivated to change these sparingly.
- The Council approved GIP-41: Store Dispute Status to improve use of arbitration from other contracts alongside GIP-59: Remove Owner Tax to reduce friction around subgraph version upgrades (bundled in GGP-0031).
- With recently announced support for Optimism subgraphs, developers can now easily access indexed Optimism data. Subgraph developers building on Optimism can now upgrade to The Graph Network.
3. Empowering the wider ecosystem of The Graph
- Edge & Node has continued to create content to engage and educate the ecosystem
- We outlined and started work on an ETH Global Guide for using The Graph.
- We published Developer Newsletter 12 and are finalizing blogs and videos on File Data Sources.
- We presented in Builders Office Hours on Subgraph Composition.
- Educational content on exciting new Sunray developments are slated for the remainder of Q1 2023 (including the subgraph upgrade flow and the free query plan).
- Marketing solidified 2024 as the year of the New Era, ushering in new data services and use cases made possible by The Graph serving even more data needs.
- 350+ people signed up for the The Graph’s 3rd birthday event, where attendees learned how The Graph grows to serve a widening array of web3 data needs.
- The House of Web3 launched its iOS and Android apps. Download the app now and stay abreast of upcoming events and news!
- Software updates have been released in order to:
- Improve query error messages, a big win for consumer & gateway operator support
- Avoid outages from monopolizing Indexers
What’s Next
We continue pushing forward the Sunrise of Decentralized Data:
- Progress is accelerating for the remaining two releases detailed under the Sunray phase: a seamless upgrade interface and a free query plan — the completion of which will enable the start of the Sunbeam phase
- We continue to prepare dapps across the hosted service for Sunrise by processing grants, walking through the steps of upgrading, and overall reducing friction for network adoption.
- We continue honing in on the chain integration process to speed up execution and ensure The Graph is always the data indexing choice that chains make when launching.
- L2 adoption on the network is a major focus for enabling faster and lower cost transactions on the network, increasing network efficiency and increased participant adoption around the world.
We continue collaborating on DevEx, UX and feature improvements to The Graph Network:
- We aim to finish testing and execute approved governance upgrades for GIP-56, GIP-62, GIP-41 and GIP-59.
- We are performing tests of Scalar/TAP payment system on The Graph Network’s Sepolia Testnet.
- We are finishing prerequisite work for Sunbeam, the second phase of the Sunrise of Decentralized Data.
- We will publish a blog post about Graph Horizon and publish a detailed deep dive explainer in a forum post