Summary
February 2025 continued Pinax’s momentum by moving more workload to Kubernetes and enhancing foundational data services. We improved the performance of managing large amounts of blockchain data using Substreams and ClickHouse technology. We experimented with making that data available for AI and other use cases. Our infrastructure expanded to support additional networks, such as Berachain, zkSync Era, Sonic, and Unichain, with substantial progress in testing integrations for Base Sepolia and IoTeX. Community engagement remained a strong focus, notably through outreach activities in Asia and Africa and active involvement within The Graph Protocol Discord community.
Here’s what we accomplished in February through mid-March:
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:
- Berachain (berachain): (RPC + Firehose + Substreams)
- Ethereum Sepolia (sepolia)
- Sonic (sonic): (RPC)
- Unichain (unichain): (RPC)
- zkSync Era (zksync-era): (RPC + Firehose + Substreams)
Chains under testing:
- Base Sepolia (base-sepolia)
- IoTeX (iotex)
- Kaia (kaia)
New Data Initiative:
Last year we loaded data from several blockchains into ClickHouse database from substreams with substreams-sink-sql. It has been working well by supporting several customer use cases and we feel confident using it as a basis for supporting new things. So….
Based on work initially started by the SteamingFast team, we are now building out a multi-chain ERC20 and native balances substream which will be used to populate data into ClickHouse. Code is under active development in our github repository. Multiple versions have been created over the last few weeks. Please read the release notes in github for details of what has been done.
Initial development and testing of the ERC20 substream is being performed on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum-One and BSC. The substream should be able to support any EVM chain that has “full block” Firehose support.
With all the data getting loaded into ClickHouse and the popularity of AI, we also are experimenting with providing Model Context Protocol (MCP) access to ClickHouse. It’s early days, but so far the results are promising.
If you want to help test the quality of the ERC20 data or the MCP service, please reach out to us.
Data Services:
- Our data services team continued to refine processes for importing and optimizing blockchain data from networks like Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum-One, BSC and Solana into Snowflake. See Substreams Raw Blocks in github for more information.
- Our operations team continued to roll out the latest updates to the Neo4j-powered Knowledge Graph and related services.
Auxiliary Services:
- Expanded our data center with an additional 800GB of storage to ensure stable and reliable data access across the network as support for new chains grows.
- More than doubled our ClickHouse cluster size.
- Successfully managed over 7 hard fork events and major upgrades, executing a proactive strategy to minimize service disruption across Ethereum, BSC, Arbitrum, Rootstock, Kava, and numerous test networks. We spent a lot of dealing with Pectra hard fork issues on Holesky and Sepolia.
- Launched billing system so indexers can easily pay for Firehose, Substreams and RPC services.
Community & Documentation: Education and Support for Indexers and Developers
We published one additional post on our blog in which we were introducing Riccardo Esclapon and highlighted cutting-edge automation and data tools for The Graph community:
We started an active role on The Graph Protocol Discord by implementing structured channels for newly onboarded chains and managing the respective access permissions. Additionally we’re continuing event production support for the weekly Builders Office Hours.
We also published a new release of the graph-cli that includes integration with Sourcify, as well as several quality-of-life improvements. Link: Graph CLI v0.96.0 Release
As part of our Asia outreach, we’ve joined 15 new groups and contacted 17 admins for permission to post translated content, focusing on Chinese and Vietnamese web3 communities.Furthermore we successfully helped to reestablish access to the Graph Africa community, reconnecting with nearly 700 developers to enhance collaboration and support.
Looking ahead (upcoming priorities)
Data Services:
- Continue to test and build out featureset with Substreams / Clickhouse / Token API / MCP. Add support for Solana.
- Continue to expand the Snowflake marketplace integration with additional chain support, based on user requests.
Infrastructure & Tooling:
- Update infrastructure to use Kubernetes to facilitate improved speed, reliability, scalability and status reporting.
- Ongoing maintenance and enhancement of the Graph CLI to ensure robustness and usability for developers.
Community & Documentation:
- Supporting operational tools for indexers
- Ongoing support on The Graph Discord
- Ongoing promotion of News related to The Graph in Asian communities