Pinax May 2025 Update

Research & Development Core Team Updates
1

:woman_astronaut: Summary

This month brought several major releases to The Graph, highlighted by the launch of our NFT API endpoints and significant improvements to our underlying infrastructure. Our focus was on productionizing NFT endpoints, advancing our Substreams-powered backend for both tokens and NFTs, and improving scalability and reliability in anticipation of growing demand.

A major highlight this month was the successful launch of our NFT API endpoints, providing unified and performant access across multiple EVM chains. This was complemented by a series of enhancements to our underlying Substreams pipelines, now leveraging RPC batch calls for full ERC-20 coverage. Alongside development, we prioritized analytics and observability by implementing robust MCP usage logging for better data insights.

Infrastructure-wise, May was marked by aggressive backfilling and ingestion efforts as we scaled out multi-TB production databases. Performance and error handling improvements helped us keep pace with rapid data growth.

:tada: Looking back (what was delivered)

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

MCP Services:

  • MCP Usage Analytics and Logging: Implemented comprehensive logging and ClickHouse materialized views for all MCP message traffic, providing structured data for usage analytics, agent optimization, and AI training pipelines across all deployed MCP endpoints.
  • MCP Routing & Redirection: Shipped endpoint redirections under The Graph Token API MCP domain, future-proofing for unified agent-based access and integrations across The Graph ecosystem.

Token API:

  • API enhancements: Shipped production-ready NFT endpoints (NFT API v1.5.0) supporting ownership, metadata, and transfer queries across all major EVM chains, with improved response times through per-network database mappings, batching, secondary index optimizations, and resolved materialized view inconsistencies.
  • NFT Data:
    • Ingested and synchronized historic transfer and metadata for ERC-721/1155 collections on Ethereum, BSC, Base, and Polygon.
    • Reduced ingestion memory footprint by 3–5x for higher throughput and network coverage.
    • Rolled out OpenSea Seaport trade ingestion for real-time sales insights. Implemented ClickHouse schemas for on-chain price and volume analytics.
  • Substreams Development:
    • Replaced storage-diff based ERC-20 balance tracking with robust RPC batch querying
    • Published clickhouse-tokens-v1.13.0 with full ERC-20 and native token historical balance coverage.
    • Released Uniswaps v0.1.5 with V4 support, extended V2/V3 event coverage, and Base chain support.

Auxiliary Services:

  • Infrastructure: Introduced automated backup and rapid restore flows to safeguard data and ensure quick recovery from node failures. Improved load-balancing and RPC endpoint reliability to sustain fast, uninterrupted access for all users and chains.
  • Hard forks: Coordinated and executed node upgrades for eight major hard forks across BSC Mainnet/Testnet, Gnosis, Arbitrum Sepolia, Ethereum Mainnet, Blast, Optimism, and Near, ensuring post-fork validation and uninterrupted service through proactive monitoring and rapid response.
  • Documentation: Migrated and refreshed Token API documentation to The Graph’s documentation portal, updating usage flows and guides for new features and endpoints. Added MCP integration guides and improved endpoint discoverability across the site.

Community & Documentation: Education and Support for Indexers and Developers

We published an article on our blog, in which we introduced Tycho and highlighted how their Substreams-powered tech simplifies DeFi trade execution by leveraging The Graph.

Our video team has produced a couple of shorts to highlight the technical aspects of The Graph Token API, which are published on our YouTube Channel, X Account, TikTok and the Douyin (Chinese TikTok).

We’ve continued event production support for the weekly Builders Office Hours.

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.

:rocket: Looking ahead (upcoming priorities)

Data Services:

  • Continue to build and add features to the Token API.

Infrastructure & Tooling:

  • Migrate infrastructure to Kubernetes to improve speed, reliability, and scalability, while also enhancing status reporting and operational management for Token API requirements including database scaling and capacity management.

Community & Documentation:

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