Hey everyone!
Here’s a quick look at what we shipped in January across Firehose, Substreams, and The Graph ecosystem, plus what’s currently in flight.
This month was all about performance, developer experience, and getting major integrations closer to production.
What we shipped
Flashblocks Beta – Our Flashblocks endpoint for Base Mainnet is now available in beta. MEV teams have been helping us to design and test it since last months’ alpha release. Try it out and ensure you get access to the data you need before anyone else!
Besu Integration Handed Off for Testing – The Besu integration is now in the hands of a third party for testing and validation.
Monad Extended Blocks: Internal Tests Passing – Monad extended blocks are now passing all internal test suites, marking a major milestone toward production readiness.
New Local Development Guides for Substreams – Published new docs and tooling to simplify end-to-end testing with Substreams using a local chain. The recommended setup uses a Firehose-instrumented Geth dev node + fireeth, providing:
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A fully valid Ethereum dev node (RPC + Firehose) compatible with Foundry & Hardhat
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A complete local Substreams endpoint wired to your node
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Docker images for single-command setup
These guides now document fully tested, working setups.
Substreams Skills for Coding Agents (Open-Sourced) – Open-sourced Substreams Skills, a set of structured skills you can plug into your coding agent to build Substreams faster and with fewer mistakes:
https://github.com/streamingfast/substreams-skills
This gives agents opinionated guidance on manifests, Rust modules, Protobuf, sink patterns (Postgres, ClickHouse, KV, files), testing workflows, and real Substreams domain knowledge.
Substreams Sink SQL: Delta Updates (Postgres) – Added delta update support to make incremental aggregations easier and more efficient:
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Write aggregations (volume, counts, sums, min/max) without reprocessing full tables
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Apply atomic, incremental updates as new chain data arrives
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Keep logic SQL-native and Postgres-friendly
A Uniswap v4 candle demo shows this in practice:
https://github.com/streamingfast/substreams-eth-uni-v4-demo-candles
(Thanks to community contributor @agg on Discord for the PR!)
What’s in flight
New Compression Algorithms – Introducing new compression algorithms that significantly speed up compression and improve response times, continuing to keep Substreams as the fastest indexed blockchain data provider in the market
Substreams / Firehose Processing Speed Improvements – Shipped multiple performance optimizations to increase end-to-end processing throughput across both Substreams and Firehose.
Latency Benchmarking & Optimization – Ongoing benchmarking with a goal to further reduce latency across the stack.
Monad Integration Cleanup & Validation – Code cleanup and refactoring underway, with validation by the Monad team expected by end of month.
Further Substreams / Firehose Performance Optimizations – Continuing work to push processing speeds even further.
Flashblocks: Feedback & Beta Exit – Actively gathering feedback on Flashblocks support to finalize it and move out of Beta.
thegraph.market Improvements
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Improved plan management view
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Revamped onboarding flow
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Email notifications (onboarding, limits)