We are StreamingFast
We’d like to salute the whole The Graph community. We have met some of you over the years, but with the recent announcement, it is our desire to eventually meet each and every one of you, in person or online - in that order of preference!
Consider this post our induction speech, where we tell you a bit about our story, our goals, and how we want to work with you all.
Our journey
Marc-Antoine Ross, our CEO, had run and sold several businesses. Alexandre met Marc at Intel, his last acquirer, where they ran the data science department for the division together. They had lots of fun building large scale data systems for hundreds of millions of computers shipped worldwide.
Mathieu Boulianne, our COO, came from an investment banking background, and provided the deep insights in markets that would help the company make the right strategic decisions. His enthusiasm for the innovation in the ecosystem had led him to grasp all what was happening and allowed him to contribute to the vision of the company.
Alexandre Bourget, our CTO, is an inspirational & prolific innovator with insane technical depth - Alex is unstoppable when he takes on the most complex challenges. Having productionized multiple high performance data platforms, he’s demonstrated his ability to help a team ship best-of-breed software. In 2013, Alex built Canada’s first Bitcoin payment processor, but was a few years ahead of the curve.
Working together at Intel, Alex turned Marc onto the data problems that were present in the blockchain space. After leaving Intel, they joined with Mathieu to begin solving the “read problem” of blockchain data. The data in there always seemed so juicy, with transactions and bits of data extremely valuable to those who transact. Together, they knew that the right solution would be extremely valuable to every developer and application built on top.
We started off as a PoS network validator to generate revenue, while building a reputation for shipping good software, fast. We used our validator revenues to invest in the “dfuse” stack (later renamed StreamingFast) and ship innovative indexing solutions, one after the other. We open sourced our stack and started gathering a community of contributors. All the while, other companies and teams started to run our software.
We were able to move quickly and service many large and well-known crypto projects as a traditional SaaS company, but we saw the amazing network effects of a decentralized network like The Graph. Running into members of the team at conferences and hackathons over the years, it was clear that we shared the same goals, our teams had complementing skill sets, and together we could propel decentralized data access to where developers need it to be for Web3 adoption to really accelerate.
Our goal within The Graph
Our goal is simple: make all the data from all blockchains, readily accessible in ways that are efficiently stored and efficiently queried in an economically viable way. That has always been our goal, and that’s why it aligns so well with The Graph. What’s new is we’ll be adding to that the thought process of decentralized economic incentive structures, an exciting and promising area of development to what we have been doing.
Some of you might have seen the PancakeSwap story and how we were involved. It is our desire to bring these valuable learnings to The Graph ecosystem, to expand its offering and ensure it can keep up with the blazing fast tech that is being developed in new Layer 1 and Layer 2 protocols. This includes some of our multi-blockchain capabilities, streaming-first APIs and parallelization capabilities.
While we might have demonstrated high-performance capabilities and expertise, we know that we still have to further integrate ourselves into this already thriving and growing Graph community. We have already met brilliant individuals, and are confident that the intersection of our technologies will produce even better ideas and software design. This is why we will be proposing a few RFCs (and GIPs for those that touch the protocol) to start a conversation around what we have and could contribute. The goal here: disseminate knowledge and learnings about the approaches we’ve taken over the years, and after considering the feedback of the different technical teams, decide what’s the best path going forward.
A few other immediate goals of ours:
- grow the community of indexers
- grow the community of end users
- get more applications feeding end user experience through The Graph
- grow the list of supported networks and protocols
Ultimately, we want to make The Graph the universal standard to query blockchain data.
We love being mentors at hackathons, doing public speaking at large events, evangelizing at conferences. We will be happy to join some The Graph booths all around the world, to meet you all.
Huge thanks in advance for all of those making efforts to welcome us, taking time to interact with us and our software.
How we work
Our motto in the last few years has been: Ship it like there’s no tomorrow.
We’re a highly efficient team of 10 (we are currently hiring) that likes to ship stuff in the hands of end users. We’d love feedback from the developer community, and we thrive when designing large scale data systems.
It will be important to us to understand the needs and goals of the different participants in the ecosystem. This is our ask to you all: please reach out to us to let us know what is important to you, what are the pain points you experience today that we could solve for tomorrow, what are your goals and how can we help you achieve them. That knowledge will be invaluable to us, to decide the next big thing to address. The Graph Foundation and Edge & Node already have a good idea of large priority items, and we’ll be collaborating with them heavily, but it’s important to us that we get a direct feel of the community needs and develop a good working relationship with each of you.
How to connect with us
The best way to connect with us going forward is either in the StreamingFast Discord or The Graph’s Discord. We will also be using Twitter as our main information dissemination tool, so be sure to give us a follow there as well.
We’ll be participating in, and scrolling through, the forums at https://forum.thegraph.com to not miss any larger-scale discussions.
We’d also like to invite you to listen to the GRTiQ podcast that Marc was on recently, to help give some more context to those who’d like to learn more about the StreamingFast team. We’re extremely excited by the work that lies ahead!