Meetings Update (Eva Beylin)
For more clarity, the former protocol town hall monthly meeting has now transitioned into The Graph’s Core Devs meeting. A separate community call will be implemented in the future to address delegators, curators, subgraph developers and the wider Graph community.
Protocol Upgrades (Ariel Barmat)
Two of The Graph’s governance proposals have been approved by The Graph Council. The changes are detailed below. These changes will be implemented in the coming days.
GGP 0003: Dispute Manager Upgrade
GIP-0007 – Currently, slashing percentages are the same for indexing and query disputes. This GIP allows for practical slashing percentages based on the weight of the error. Slashing indexers at the same rate for both dispute types may disincentivize indexers servicing queries.
GGP 0004: Staking Upgrade
GIP-0010 – When an indexer closes their allocation with an empty POI, the rewards snapshot is not updated. This will update the rewards snapshot when an empty POI is presented before deallocating tokens.
GIP-0011 – Delegation parameters initialization when used from stakeTO()
GIP-0012 – This GIP reduces gas usage by caching address resolution. It saves between 5% and 15% on gas cost depending on the transaction.
Delegation Working Group (Oliver Zerhusen)
A delegation working group had been formed to tackle and discuss improvements in the delegation experience! The group will focus on the consolidation of delegator community feedback to identify delegator pain points and implement solutions that prioritize both delegator and protocol needs. The intended output of this working group is to produce a roadmap to detail delegator experience enhancements that the community can provide feedback on in the forum. The goal of the roadmap is to provide clarity of how the community prioritizes delegator experience enhancements as input for the Core Dev teams.
Draft GIP – Stable Rewards Yield (Ariel Barmat)
This proposal, authored by Ariel, changes how delegator rewards are calculated to obtain more intuitive and stable commission rates.
Arbitration (Ariel Barmat)
In the last two weeks, there were open disputes for the p2p indexer due to determinism issues found in the presented POIs due to a wrong eth_call. The indexer was not slashed, but the team is starting to work on reproducing the same determinism issues to find out if the error was due to one of the ethereum nodes or another issue. A CLI has been published that allows users to manage disputes.
(npm i -g @graphprotocol/graph-disputes).
Core Processes (Adam Fuller)
The Graph’s network participant and developer community is growing! For example, the work Limechain has been accomplishing on the unit testing framework in assemblyScript. It has become increasingly important for the core software’s development and release schedule to become standardized.
Protocol Components
- graph-node
- graph-cli
- indexer-cli
- graph-ts
- indexer-service
- indexer-agent
Other Versions
- specVersion – version of the subgraph manifest
- apiVersion – version of the mappings API
The goal is to have more frequent releases every 2-4 weeks, enable outside developers to contribute to graph-cli and to upgrade assemblyScript to the latest version. Updating the assemblyScript will introduce new functionality across graph-node, graph-cli and graph-ts. To achieve the goal of standardizing core software development, The Graph’s development team has three requests for help:
-
Indexers for Beta Testing
- If you have components that might be impacted by graph-node releases which are used by others, please get in touch.
- The Graph is looking for development community members who are interested in joining a working group on how best to extend graph-cli in a modular way.
- The Graph is looking for subgraph developers who are interested in testing due to requirements related to the assemblyScript upgrade.
If you are interested in any of these opportunities to support The Graph, reach out to Adam Fuller or to any of The Graph’s development team in Discord.
Core Processes Questions
Do we have any thoughts on whether those will be minor versions, patches or major versions? How are you thinking about that relative to the frequency of upgrading the version at the protocol level?
– Brandon Ramirez
Will there be breaking changes due to the assemblyScript update?
Semiotic AI (Ahmet Ozcan)
Semiotic AI is a Bay Area startup applying its expertise in AI and cryptography to handle query negotiations within the protocol. Latency can be used as a metric to measure complexity, and in turn, cost. Because predicting latency is difficult, Semiotic AI have been using AI to develop a method to predict the cost of running a query. This is a big step to assist indexers – currently tasked with pricing queries – to run an efficient indexing operation.
Research (Matt Deible)
An issue indexers face is accurately pricing with simple rules, while still accounting for expensive outliers. Semiotic AI developed a deep learning model to predict latency from a raw GraphQL query. Data from the hosted service was initially used, but the data contained a large volume of repeated or similar queries. Semiotic AI developed a query generator that is trained via reinforcement learning to generate unique queries and more accurately predict future query cost. The team has also open-sourced an Indexer stress test tool.
Semiotic AI Questions
What are the bottlenecks on the time it takes to compute a prediction? What do we think a viable lower bound might be on that time?
How long did it take to train the models and the most recent pipeline used for testing?
Stay Tuned!
Join us next month for The Graph’s Core Devs Meeting #6
Keep up to date by following The Graph on Twitter or joining the Discord Server.
For further discussion on the topics covered in The Graph’s Core Devs meetings, attend indexer office hours in the Graph Stage voice channel every Tuesday.
Access a full transcript of Core Devs Meeting #5 here, or watch it on YouTube!