Edge & Node’s September/October Update

Research & Development Core Team Updates
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:woman_astronaut: Executive Summary

At Edge & Node, we are on a mission to make The Graph the Internet’s unbreakable foundation of open data to create a world powered by individual autonomy, shared self-sovereignty and limitless collaboration. We accomplished a ton this month specifically and more broadly in Q3. In September, we increased adoption of the protocol on Arbitrum, helped to empower and grow the in Delegator community and progressed towards the Sunrise of Decentralized Data with a new plan. With the sunrise plan, we get closer to upgrading all subgraphs to the decentralized network!

Notable September Accomplishments:

  • The Graph-themed Coinbase Quest campaign launched and led to 20,000+ new Delegators on Arbitrum in just one week! We welcome these new community members to The Graph ecosystem. We are grateful to partners like Coinbase for their continued emphasis for Coinbase users to come on-chain.
  • Exponential Rebates (GIP-0051 Exponential Rebates) have launched in production as the updated query rebate mechanism for the protocol on both Ethereum and Arbitrum, replacing the Cobb-Douglas mechanism. This greatly enhanced the economic efficiency of the Network by enabling Indexers with tools for good decision-making.
  • Deutsche Telekom joined The Graph Network as Indexers. They proudly announced they are now organizing blockchain data. Saying it was “another step in our advancement of blockchain technology and digital transformation,” following The Graph’s lead in enabling decentralized data.

Notable Q3 Accomplishments:

  • We shipped the Billing Subscriptions MVP, which allows early adopter devs and data consumers to pay a fixed monthly rate for queries - stay tuned for permissionless access to subscriptions.
  • We integrated and supported Base’s mainnet - developers are building subgraphs on Base.
  • We have empowered the community to build sophisticated substreams-powered subgraphs along with documentation on how to get started building. We also collaborated with StreamingFast to ship a benchmarking analysis on the indexing speed of Substreams-powered subgraphs.
  • We released L2 Transfer Tools to help network participants seamlessly migrate their subgraphs, stake, signal, and delegation to The Graph Network on Arbitrum, giving everyone much reduced transaction fees.
  • Improving support across The Graph has been a big focus. With this, we rolled out a robust feedback and support system for managing infrastructure incidents.
  • We made improvements on four of the top dapp blockers alongside the other core devs.

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

1. Adoption of The Graph Network

  • The adoption of The Graph Network is accelerating. With 13 new upgrades in September, The Graph Network closed out its best quarter of adoption yet, with 65 total upgrades for Q3. Overall, we the Network reached 1,312 published subgraphs, up 158 from last quarter.
  • We supported more dapps across multiple chains, sending network upgrade grants for 30 subgraphs and securing upgrade commitments for 70+ subgraphs. Empowering these projects to get one step closer to using the network in production.

2. Improving The Graph Network experience

  • Improving The Graph Network’s billing experience - We are working towards the implementation of a free query 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, along with hackathon participants and hobbyists, helping grow a large and crucial part of the web3 ecosystem.
  • We launched the L2 transfer tools - When The Graph Network was launched, L2s were not yet available. As web3 innovated and adapted, so has The Graph. With the protocol’s adoption of L2 technology, transactions became orders of magnitude cheaper. Last month the protocol continued to scale with the launch of the L2 transfer tools. This month The Graph Council voted to update L2 rewards to 25% and then 50% after noting how quickly people adopted L2. Over 45% of decentralized queries are now on L2.
  • We published GIP-0059, which advocates to disable subgraph owner tax when publishing a new version, which would reduce friction points in using the network for subgraph developers who often iterate upon their subgraphs.
  • We published GIP-0060, which advocates to allow closing allocations under an epoch in the effort to make Indexer operations more efficient.
  • We released a user interface for transferring L2 balances to L1, particularly for vested contracts. Now users can transfer GRT on vested contracts in both directions for L1 & L2

3. Empowering the wider ecosystem of The Graph

  • We hosted a discussion with the community around the developing concept of "DIPs” (Direct Indexer Payments) to receive feedback and provide clarifications on GIP-0058, which details replacing bonding curves with indexing fees.
  • We increased performance of the Network Analytics Subgraph to support thousands of delegations (see GitHub commit).

Other accomplishments this month

House of Web3

Developer Relations

  • Edge & Node’s DevRel continues to make impact across ecosystem events, including:
    • ETHWarsaw, ETHAccra, DappCon, ETHChicago, GraphQL Conf SF, and ETHGlobal New York
    • At ETHGlobal New York, out of 303 hackathon submissions, 38 used The Graph!

Marketing

Product Marketing

What’s Next

We continue pushing towards the Sunrise of Decentralized Data:

  • To support upgrades to the decentralized world, we are initializing the upgrade Indexer’s base infrastructure on the The Graph Network. When the upgrade Indexer is operational, it will allocate only the minimum amount per subgraph and will not be collecting indexing rewards, only query fees for queries served. Read more about the sunrise plan here, more details on the plan coming soon.
  • The upgrade Indexer will bootstrap chains and active subgraphs on the network that are currently only on the hosted service, making it even easier for developers and data consumers to take advantage of the decentralized network. As a reminder, all Indexers are welcome to index the same subgraphs and chains as the upgrade Indexer — a few have already committed to doing so!
  • With fully 50% of indexing rewards on Arbitrum, we continue encouraging 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.
    • If you are an Indexer or Delegator on The Graph, please ensure to transfer to Arbitrum.
  • Extract and define common components for making it easy to build data services beyond subgraphs.
  • Deploy The Graph Network to Sepholia testnet following Arbitrum’s migration.

We continue collaborating on improvements to The Graph Network:

  • Preparing release of graph-node v0.33.0 with support for Arweave file data sources (release note).
  • Continue work integrating TAP payment system with a rewrite of the indexer-service in Rust.
  • Continue to 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 development of billing improvements such as the subscriptions notification system and recurring payments.
  • Publish a first draft of The Graph Horizon GIP including detailing Flat Indexing Rewards.
  • We continue working with Spyglass Labs to support storage of the DisputeManager’s dispute resolution status on chain (GIP-0041).

We have set additional goals in the following categories:

Business Development and Partnerships

  • Continue working with 100+ dapps that have committed to upgrade, as well as garner more upgrade commitments, to help developers move over and leverage the network in production. We aim to help upgrade at least 20 subgraphs to the decentralized network.
  • Continue pushing for net new adoption with dapps, as well as ecosystems not yet using The Graph heavily such as Solana, Arweave and web3 social.
  • Continue working with chains to increase the number of network integrations, unlocking The Graph for even more developers across the web3 landscape.
  • Continue scaling The Graph Network on Arbitrum:
    • Helping Indexers, Delegators, & Curators transfer to Arbitrum with L2 Transfer tools
    • Getting subgraphs across and participating on Arbitrum using L2 Transfer tools
  • Open up billing subscriptions for all and provide a plan that includes bundled curation and queries.

Product Marketing

  • Continue to update the community on additional progress made towards the sunrise of decentralized data.
  • Educate on billing learnings from The Graph subscriptions in beta.
  • Share more use cases surrounding Arweave as a new File Data Source in graph-node.

Developer Relations

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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