We are excited to introduce Protofire team in this segment called “ Know Your Indexer ” in this week edition.
This team is always prepared in The Graph’s communities like Telegram and Discord to help users and you can also find them in the Spanish communities helping the new spanish speakers delegators and answer any questions regarding the protocol.
Protofire Interview
Ghostym:
- How did you get into Blockchain? How long have you been running nodes or participating in the blockchain ecosystem?
Protofire team: Protofire was born in 2017 as a team of engineers, which helps decentralized protocols and developer platforms to accelerate growth of their ecosystems.
It was created as a business unit within Altoros seeking to promote open source Blockchain projects, especially Defi ones.
As a first step, we started working with important projects like POA Network Bridges, 0x, Aragon DAO, xDAI, Maker, and many others and continued looking for strategic alliances with protocols on the latest blockchain trends.
On the infrastructure side, the validator nodes of POA (DAI) and Avalanche began to run in 2018. Then the Filecoin project started with their validators and finally the implementation of The Graph clusters.
Braian Leiva (Protofire Indexer): I met Bitcoin trying to get away from banks in Argentina 3 years ago. I read the Bitcoin whitepaper and I was fascinated. Then I set up a btc node and I began working with these new technologies.
When I entered Protofire, I started working directly on The Graph. Given my 5 years’ experience as a DevOps, I was able to considerably improve and automate the infrastructure migrating from GCP to AWS. I have been working on this project for more than 6 months now.
Zuni:
- What was your first experience with The Graph and why did you choose to participate in The Graph ecosystem?
Protofire team: From the beginning our team saw the potential of The Graph to be a key tool in the development and growth of web3.
At Protofire we started in 2019 analyzing protocols such as Augur, Maker, Livepeer, Audius and soon we finalized an agreement to work with The Graph’s core team to develop the first subgraphs and promote their adoption in the community, seeking to create mainly quality subgraphs and suitable to be consumed by different apps.
We also try to promote the use of subgraphs in the community by publishing blogs, actively participating in forums and social networks and also adding value through toolkits and direct participation in the projects of The Graph core team.
At the same time we develop and release subgraphs for well-known protocols and projects such as MakerDAO, Opyn, Curve, Synthetix DAO, Swarm, etc.
Ghostym:
- Did you participate in the Mission Control testnet? How would you describe the experience?
Protofire team: Protofire participated in the Mission Control testnet. It was an intense and very challenging experience that involved great internal coordination in our team between developers and devops.
We always tried to be in all meetings and discussions of the community providing maximum possible support.
Besides the complexity of the process and some drawbacks, The Graph’s core team always rose to the occasion by reporting everything in a timely manner.
Zuni:
- How many indexers do you currently have in mainnet? Have you thought about adding more indexers in the future?
Protofire team: So far we have only one but we are analyzing creating new clusters in other regions (our cluster is on AWS) to receive queries from different geographical points. Having everything automated, this would not involve much effort.
At the same time this helps us to decentralize the stake between different clusters and addresses.
Ghostym:
- Are you currently participating in the current testnet? (If your answer is yes, tell us what is your favorite part of participating in the testnet)
Protofire team: Yes, we are participating, testing the new versions of the different applications before implementing them in production and we also take advantage of this to test new ideas and business concepts.
Zuni:
- How do you stay connected with your delegator community?
Protofire team: We are mainly connected by telegram and we also receive messages on Twitter. We are going to create new dashboards and communication channels and we want to strengthen communication in public channels, so we have open CM positions to join Protofire team for The Graph.
Ghostym:
- How many people from your team are participating in The Graph’s community? Can you share their profiles and give us a brief introduction about their background?
Currently the team is made up of 4 people who are actively working on The Graph project. (Below discord users)
- Andres (Discord: andresf#2167) and Gaby (Discord: °•○● GG ●○•°#5422) are our subgraph developers.
- Braian (Discord: Brian L. | Protofire#4327) is working as DevOps / Indexer in this project. As a certified ML specialist he is also using his ML skills in determining the subgraphs that will maximise indexer rewards.
- And Cristian (Discord: Cristian Malfesi | Protofire#2259) as a PM of the team and at the same time participating in the roles of delegator and curator.
On the other hand, there are 4 more team members who participate sporadically.
Zuni:
- What are you excited about the future of The Graph?
Protofire team: The future of The Graph is directly linked to the future of web3, being one of the projects with the greatest growth potential.
The Graph glues together various blockchain-oriented projects, not necessarily protocols. As we all know, the future of Blockchain does not revolve around one specific network, it is about various networks being connected together similar to how bridges are connecting network tokens. The Graph connects the whole Blockchain community and we are excited to be among the early adopters and continue bringing new projects into the ecosystem.
Ghostym:
- Which blockchain networks are you excited to index for The Graph?
Protofire team: We would be interested in adding blockchains that are not yet integrated and we think that they will have a great adoption such as Meter, IoTeX, Polkadot, Solanas.
Zuni:
- Why should delegators choose you?
Protofire team: We are one of the largest reputable indexers in The Graph. Our cut fee is one of the lowest that can be found in the network. Our APR/APY is usually within the highest values among the different indexers.
At the same time we try to choose subgraphs for indexing wisely, since many subgraphs are not bringing value and congest the network.
On the other hand, we are scaling up the team with new roles to help us improve our Indexer Node rewards and cost model as much as possible.
We are committed to serving the ecosystem well by delivering high-quality subgraphs, improving indexer reliability and maximizing delegator rewards.
INFORMATION ABOUT THE INDEXER
Social Networks
Twitter
Website
Telegram
Wallet address: 0xb06071394531b63b0bac78f27e12dc2beaa913e4
If you want to participate in this segment, follow the next steps:
1 . Ask your questions in this post by leaving a comment
2 . You can review the other comments and see the answers directly from the Indexer
3 . Don’t forget to share this with your friends and colleagues to learn about the exciting ecosystem of The Graph ! 
