Summary
We published the new Geo website over the break and announced that the public launch of Geo Genesis is coming soon! There was a lot of excitement from the community.
I think this is the first time people can go to the website and really understand what Geo’s supposed to be. Since the launch is coming soon, we’re going to be entering a quiet period where we’re not going to reveal too many details about what we’re up to. We’ll get back to posting detailed updates after the launch.
Last month I shared that my top priority for December was getting alignment between the core devs on what the mission and vision of The Graph is. I shared that there were roughly 2 competing visions.
- Empowering developers to easily access blockchain data
- Empowering communities to organize and access all the world’s public knowledge and information in a decentralized way
We’ve had several conversations on the topic and the core devs are roughly split in half. I’m a firm believer that the 2nd statement of the vision is the right one for several reasons:
- The second is a superset of the first
- The opportunity is many orders of magnitude bigger than the first
- It will create a bigger more positive impact on the world
- It makes The Graph something that matters and is relevant to 8B people instead of 20M people
- It gets us out of zero sum competition with an increasing number of competitors and allows us to do something that only The Graph can do
- Our community is diverse. We have Graph Advocates, Delegators, a University program, and many other community members that aren’t technical. We should activate them to contribute more meaningfully to The Graph so they can be empowered to create more value and make money in return.
It’s been difficult to get alignment because many of the core devs are developers and they like the idea of only serving developers. It feels more approachable to them. We have developers as customers today and it feels risky to serve entirely new markets.
But this was always the vision of The Graph that I described from the beginning. You can trace me talking about “organizing all the world’s public knowledge and information in a decentralized way” and building “a global graph of all the world’s public knowledge and information” since 2018.
The Curator role was initially described as being a role for normal people to be incentivized to organize knowledge and information on The Graph. The role never took off because we failed to build the right tools and incentives. To me this doesn’t mean that the vision of The Graph should have been changed, but rather that we should continue to work to realize the original vision. This is what we’ve been doing at Geo for the last 2 years.
If you’re interested in seeing some background, please see this video of the launch of the Curator program in 2020 and this video of the launch of Curation in July 2021. The vision has been consistent from the beginning.
Right now there is ongoing debate about the future of Curation and the mission of The Graph. Please see this thread in the forum and this separate follow up post. This is probably the best place to chime in for now. Rem has taken a constructive tone in his follow up post that invites the community to discuss the possibilities for the role. If we have a vision for the future of Curation, I claim that it should fit in a broader vision for The Graph that extends beyond only serving developers.
I would appreciate anyone in the community who cares about the protocol to engage in this conversation. Lend your voice, and let’s shape The Graph so that we can serve as a solid foundation for all of humanity’s knowledge and information and to make the world a better place