This month in curation #8 | October

[Slimchance]

This Month:

• StreamingFast increased the indexing speed of the SushiSwap subgraph by a massive 300x.

• Arweave will integrate with The Graph. This will make Arweave data easily available to both developers and end users.

• Several protocol improvements directly affecting Subgraph Developers and Curators are being worked on.

Arweave Integration

• Arweave provides decentralized, immutable data storage. The data on Arweave is stored permanently.

• The Graph’s indexing service will be used to systemize and sort through all the data the Arweave protocol stores, making it easily accessible to developers and end users.

• Arweave’s permanent data storage makes it easier to access digital assets like NFTs and in-game collectibles. In fact, numerous successful NFT projects have emerged in the Solana ecosystem - such as Degenerate Ape Academy, Solana Monkey Business, and Aurory - and all of them are powered by Arweave.

• Read the full announcement.

Development Update

The Graph Network has now been live for over nine months. A development update was published in the middle of september. Here are some key stats:

• The Hosted service

  • 23,000 Developers have built and deployed over 22,000 subgraphs to the hosted service.

• The decentralised network

  • The network has grown to over 9000 Delegators, 2200 Curators and 160 active Indexers.

  • Hundreds of Subgraph Developers have deployed their subgraphs to the new subgraph studio for staging and development.

  • On average, each subgraph is indexed by 4.4 Indexers, and curated by 33.1 Curators.

  • The network has seen query fees range between 0.00002 GRT and 0.0002 GRT per query. This indicates that Indexers are dynamically pricing queries.

  • Over 180 subgaphs have been published to the decentralized network. They are already starting to see the benefits of a decentralized querying layer:

    • 160 Indexers competing to deliver fresh and cheap data with low latency and high reliability
    • No central point of failure
    • Naturally load-balanced
    • Geo-distributed service
    • Censorship resistance

Curator Bootstrapping Rewards distributed

• The Foundation has rewarded Curators that helped bootstrap Curation.

• Curators that signalled during the first week of curation received 700 GRT on september 29th.

Graph Improvement Proposals

GIP-0014 Batch GNS Transactions | Forum | Council Vote | Implementation | Audit

• This proposal was approved by The Graph Council. The vote ended on september 15th with 6 votes to 0.

• The improvement went live on september 27th.

• This proposal allows batching transactions on the GNS, based on the Multicall pattern seen in Uniswap.

• This allows Subgraph Developers to Publishand Signal in a single batch transaction.

• This is a much needed improvement for both Subgraph Developers and Curators. For a deeper dive into the benefits of Developer self-signal, see this forum post.

GIP-0013: Reduce Curation Tax | Forum | Proposal | Community Vote

• This is a proposal to reduce the curation tax parameter in the protocol from 2.5% to 1.0%.

• The community has voted on the proposal in a snapshot vote. For more information about snapshot voting see this forum post.

• The voting results:

  • 99.97% Yes B-GRT (GRT Holders)
  • 96.81% Yes D-GRT (Delegators)
  • 100.00% Yes I-GRT (Indexers)
  • 99.01% Yes Total

Subgraph ownership transfer | Forum | Github

• This proposal involves a number of changes to make it easier to manage a subgraph. The changes will also simplify many of the contract interfaces.

• The current primary key that defines a subgraph is a combination of graphAccount and subgraphNumber. This will change to a single subgraphID.

• An app developer that publishes a new subgraph will also mint an NFT. Whoever owns the NFT controls the subgraph. The NFT is based on a standard ERC721, so it can easily be transferred to a different account.

• It will be possible to migrate old subgraphs, minting the NFT in the process.

Save Gas when initializing a subgraph deployment | Forum | Github

• Today, the first Curator of a subgraph will spend a considerable amount of gas. This proposal describes an update to make this protocol action much more efficient.

• Gas use on first mint will be reduced from ~1,230,000 gas to ~432,000 gas. This is a ~65% reduction in gas cost.

Community Updates

Community Talk #3 | Forum | Youtube | Call Notes

• The Graph Community Talk is held on the third tuesday of each month at 08:00 PST. Join the call for the latest updates from The Graph ecosystem and protocol.

• Some of the topics that were covered in Community Talk #3:

  • Bubbletea | Timestamp | Github

    • A python-based library that makes it easier to build data applications on top of The Graph.

  • Firehose & Sparkle | Timestamp | Forum - Firehose | Forum - Sparkle

    • Streamingfast was able to improve the indexing speed of the Sushiswap Subgraph by a massive 300x. @Josh-StreamingFast gives us a great introduction to the technology they used to achieve this feat.

    • Firehose is a different way to ingest data from the blockchain. Following QA testing, the Firehose will be deployed at a large scale, becoming one of the core ingestion methods for the graph-node . This technology alone can lead to a ~5-10x increase in indexing speed.

    • Sparkle is how StreamingFast implements parallelization. Instead of ingesting blockchain data in a linear sequence, Sparkle allows for the indexing of data in parallel chunks. Combined with the Firehose, this allows for those massive speed increases we’ve seen in sushiswap and other subgraphs.

    • Josh does an exellent job at explaining Firehose and Sparkle in layman’s terms. I highly recommend watching the full segment.

If you have any suggestions on topics we should cover or initiatives you’d like to see, we would love to hear it. Comment below, or contact me directly. You can also find me at discord Slimchance#1699