Pinax April 2025 Update

Research & Development Core Team Updates
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:woman_astronaut: Summary

April was a month of significant progress for Pinax as we continued to enhance The Graph’s infrastructure and expand our community initiatives. We integrated support for new blockchains, including Etherlink, Harmony, Unichain, and IoTeX, while progressing in testing integrations for Injective and Sonic. Our multi-chain ERC-20 and native token balances substream saw schema improvements to support advanced analytics, and we enhanced ordering logic for ClickHouse tables to ensure efficient data ingestion across EVM-compatible networks. Additionally, we upgraded Firehose core dependencies, prioritizing security and compatibility. Our efforts also extended to community engagement, with active participation in The Graph Protocol Discord and outreach to global developer communities.

Here’s what we accomplished in mid-March through to the end of April:

:tada: Looking back (what was delivered)

Provided infrastructure for chains currently supported on The Graph and to support protocol integration with new chains.

New blockchains for this period:

  • Etherlink: (RPC)
  • Harmony: (RPC)
  • Hoodi: (RPC + Firehose + Substreams)
  • Ink: (RPC + Firehose + Substreams)
  • IoTeX: (RPC)
  • Unichain: (Firehose + Substreams)

Chains under testing:

  • Etherlink: (Firehose)
  • Harmony: (Firehose)
  • Injective: (Archive)
  • IoTeX: (Firehose)
  • Kaia: (Archive)
  • Sonic: (Firehose)

MCP Services:

  • Model Context Protocol (MCP) experiments also progressed, adding larger context windows and direct SQL fallback for LLM-driven queries.

Data Services:

  • API enhancements: Released new Token API versions providing endpoints for advanced analytics (swap events, liquidity pools, OHLCV, and historical balances), and delivered continuous improvements to accuracy and billing systems.
  • Data pipelines: Upgraded firehose-antelope to enhance Substreams ingestion for Antelope chains, incorporating deterministic error caching for quicker failure responses, refined retry logic with jitter to prevent system overloads, and support for zstd compression to optimize data throughput.
  • Substreams development: Advanced multi-chain ERC-20 and native token balances substream (substreams-evm-tokens) with schema improvements to support advanced analytics, including new indexes for pools and swaps and expanding support for ERC-721 and ERC-1155 token standards
  • Substreams-foundational-modules migrated to `antelope-common v0.5.0` for smoother downstream upgrades.

Auxiliary Services:

  • Storage & cluster capacity: Additional drives were deployed to expand available storage, supporting larger datasets and sustaining high performance as new chains are onboarded. Expanded storage and compute: Deployed 70 TB of high-speed NVMe across clusters to support larger historical datasets.
  • Hard forks: Successfully navigated 10+ protocol upgrades and hard forks across chains including Celo, Avalanche, BSC, Scroll, Gnosis, and others, minimizing service interruptions and maintaining uninterrupted data availability.
  • Documentation: Refreshed API docs with new authentication flows and metadata for improved discoverability.

Community & Documentation: Education and Support for Indexers and Developers

We published 4 articles on our blog, in which we introduced recent developments in The Graph ecosystem, such as StreamingFast’s Developer Contest, Dapplookers AI Agent Loky, Sourcify Integration to The Graph’s CLI and The Graph’s Token API::

On our YouTube Channel, we have published the following videos to highlight The Graph ecosystem developments and provide tutorials on The Graph tooling:

We’ve continued event production support for the weekly Builders Office Hours and manage the channel creation for newly onboarded chains in The Graph Discord.

In our efforts to promote The Graph’s Token API, we are working closely with Edge & Node’s marketing team on organic outreach and growth strategies.

Pinax Analytics Developer Etienne Donneger gave two Token API Behind The Scenes workshops at the Builder’s Office Hours and answered questions of interested web3 developers.

Additionally, we accelerated our educational outreach by providing a Token API workshop for Encode.Club and sponsored a Token API Track at Soonami’s 7th Venturethon, a multi-week online hackathon focusing on web3 and AI.

As part of our ongoing organic engagement & outreach campaign, in April, we made a total of 337 posts in relevant web3 group chats or developer communities in various regions and their respective languages, focusing on Chinese and Vietnamese web3 communities.

:rocket: Looking ahead (upcoming priorities)

Data Services:

  • Continue to test and build out featureset with Substreams / Clickhouse / Token API / NFTs / MCP. Add support for Solana.

Infrastructure & Tooling:

  • Update infrastructure to use Kubernetes to facilitate improved speed, reliability, scalability and status reporting.

Community & Documentation:

  • Supporting operational tools for indexers
  • Ongoing support on The Graph Discord
  • Ongoing promotion of News related to The Graph in Asian communities
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