Hey Brandon.
Thank you for starting this discussion.
As I said on the Indexer Office Hours, I’m not sure that this will solve the main issue with large Subgraphs.
From my point of view, we should calculate Indexing rewards only for Indexers who already fully synced the subgraph. Because only these Indexers may serve queries properly with fresh data.
For broken Subgraphs, like Opyn (that should be a totally rare case if dApp really uses this subgraph), it could be sync till the last correct POI before an issue.
The current rewards system incentivize Indexers to start syncing subgraphs on-chain from the beginning, why it’s bad:
- Subgraph could be broken and can’t be synced to the chainhead, formally it’s not a problem for rewards now, but it seems that this kind of subgraphs and their sync doesn’t provide anything to the network. But when it will be detected, Indexers should reallocate to the new one, spend gas, nervous, and time for additional manual actions.
- Some subgraphs couldn’t be synced for 28 epochs at all. Old Sushi and Synthetix. So, in this case, Indexers will lose all rewards after 28 epochs until fully synced these subgraphs. Additionally, have a chance to wipe all rewards if someone close their allocation after 28 epochs from the delegator’s side (it happened for some Indexers several times).
- Indexers without good knowledge of the Network can jump in with huge allocations, impact proportion for rewards a lot, but as a result of #2 will close allocation with 0 POI. Good Indexers on this subgraph will get fewer rewards, delegators of first Indexers lose all rewards for 28 days also. Other good Indexers who fully synced it off-chain wouldn’t allocate to it because of bad proportion as you described.
- Current system does not incentivize Indexers to find out how to sync subgraphs faster to server queries as soon as possible, because 99% will be synced anyway for 28 epochs with default settings. But dApps will not get served queries for a long time.
New system of rewards will not heavily cut rewards for indexers, because they will keep allocating to existing Subgraphs and getting rewards. After they fully sync new subgraph they will calculate better allocations across network subgraphs and everything will be balanced. Indexers who take care about sync speed and query serving will get more than Indexers who just siting without any actions.