The Graph Ecosystem: October 2026 in Review

General
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The October recap is live on the blog: October 2026 in Review | Blog | The Graph

October was the month the Q3 plan started to show results on The Graph Network. Here is the short version, with links to go deeper. Every item below came up on Graph Office Hours.

Studio Traffic to The Graph Network

Studio staging queries for BNB Smart Chain and Polygon Subgraphs ended on October 8. Those queries now go to Network Indexers, who serve them and collect the query fees. The Upgrade Indexer unallocated from about 214 Subgraphs that the Network already supports, and 551 inactive Matic and BSC Subgraphs were deleted.

As of today, all 860+ BSC and Polygon Subgraphs were removed from Subgraph Studio’s staging infrastructure. The Upgrade Indexer’s scope dropped from 3,417 allocations to 1,723, and no major issues came up. Studio support for other chains winds down chain by chain over the coming weeks.

If your Subgraph still runs only on a Studio staging endpoint:

  1. Publish the Subgraph to The Graph Network.

  2. Set up billing and an API key in Studio.

  3. Switch your app to a Gateway endpoint.

Announcement: Bringing Subgraph Studio Traffic to The Graph Network | Blog | The Graph

Rewards Eligibility Oracle

The Daily Query Requirement rose twice in October: to 5 qualifying Subgraphs per online day on October 6, and to 10 on October 27. All other criteria stay the same. The two-month retrospective reports:

  • About 667,000 GRT built up on the allocations of Indexers that failed REO. It went to the reclaim contract instead of to those Indexers. No decision has been made on how reclaimed GRT will be used.

  • Eligible Indexers rose from 51 at enforcement to 55. Four Indexers qualified for the first time.

  • Under the 5-Subgraph rule, eligible Indexers fell from 55 to 48, as designed. Rewards paid per day held steady.

  • On October 29, 47 Indexers were eligible. The full effect of the 10-Subgraph rule shows by about November 10.

  • 79.0M GRT was still delegated to Indexers failing REO on October 29.

Each change comes with about 14 days of notice. The Foundation will measure how the network responds to the October 27 change before it proposes anything further.

Chain Integration Updates

Ink is now supported on Firehose and Substreams with Extended Blocks, listed in networks registry v0.8.8. It joins Arc, HyperEVM and Robinhood Chain from Q3, and Subgraphs on Anubis continue with InfraDAO as backstop Indexer. Pinax operates the Arc, HyperEVM and Ink endpoints.

These networks were deprecated and removed from Subgraph Studio:

  • October 16: near-mainnet, near-testnet

  • October 19: fuse, fuse-testnet

  • October 21: soneium, soneium-testnet, kaia, kaia-testnet, zksync-era-sepolia, arbitrum-nova, monad-testnet, viction, and fantom (with select historical support for existing users)

  • November 2: botanix, botanix-testnet

Soneium keeps its Substreams support. The Foundation is coordinating with Network Indexers on Subgraph support for Robinhood Chain.

Substreams v0.8.0

Rust protobuf bindings move from prost to buffa. Blocks decode 2.9x to 4.9x faster depending on the chain, and a 1.5M-block Uniswap v4 backfill on Ethereum dropped from 342 s to 118 s. The upgrade is opt-in, needs Substreams CLI v1.25.0 or later, and changes nothing downstream.

Migration guide: Migrating from prost to buffa | Substreams

Other October Software Releases

AI agents pay per query with x402

vAPI runs a marketplace where AI agents find and pay for APIs. Its listing for The Graph exposed 20 Subgraph endpoints as of October 19. Each query costs $0.01 in USDC on Base through The Graph’s x402 gateway, with no API key or account.

Foundation initiatives

  • Multi-Gateway Plan: with The Graph Council for review, and likely shared with the community in November.

  • Subgraph Studio pricing: a simpler pricing model, still months away.

  • Liquid Staking: holding in Phase 1. Avantgarde Finance, which operated the vault day to day, is winding down. Thanks to Avantgarde for its contributions. The Foundation is lining up a new operator, and Phase 2 brings UI updates and a new liquid staking partner.

  • Direct Indexer Payments: contracts deployed and dormant. Release is slated for later this year.

Informational only. This is not financial, investment, legal or tax advice.

October recordings

Questions or feedback? Reply below or join Graph Office Hours on Tuesdays at 17:00 UTC on the Discord stage.