This Month in Graph Indexing - July 2021 Edition

General Ecosystem Updates
1

:newspaper: This Month in Graph Indexing - July Edition :newspaper:

Welcome to This Month in Graph Indexing where we look back at the last month and highlight the most interesting happenings in The Graph Indexer community.

:milky_way: Graph Curation and Subgraph Studio Launch :milky_way:

Curation via the brand new Explorer and subgraph publishing via the new Subgraph Studio are now live on Mainnet. This allows Curators to signal and subgraph developers to publish subgraphs on Mainnet. Curators are starting to signal on the newly published subgraphs and the beginnings of a Curation Market is emerging.

image
image1649×1035 100 KB

The Graph Explorer showing subgraphs and their signal amounts - Subgraphs | Graph Explorer

Now that there are many subgraphs on the network, the job of selecting which subgraphs to Index and serve queries for is that much harder. In order to help with deciding on selection strategies, @cryptovestor has written a guide to subgraph selection as a starting point for Indexers thinking about revenue, transaction costs and subgraph selection.

Indexers are also finding that the sync time of subgraphs plays a very important role in deciding if a subgraph is worth allocating to or not. Without testing and planning allocations out, there is a risk that an Indexer cannot sync a subgraph to the chainhead before the full 28 epoch (~28 day) lifecycle of an allocation is hit. This is further complicated by the fact that an Indexer’s delegators have the power to close their allocations with a 0x0 PoI (Proof of Indexing i.e. the proof an Indexer needs to provide to prove they geneuinely indexed a specific subgraph) if the Indexer lets the allocation live past the 28th epoch. Closing an allocation with an 0x0 PoI results in all rewards for that allocation being sacrificed for both the Indexer and their Delegators.

In order to mitigate the above risks for Indexers and their Delegators, it is strongly recommended that an Indexer adds the following to their workflow:

  1. Make sure your allocations are being actively managed and never let them run over 28 epochs
  2. Add offchain syncing into your subgraph selection workflow. Offchain syncing can be performed by the indexer-agent using the --offchain-subgraphs flag. Provide a list of comma-separated subgraph IPFS hashes to this flag and it will deploy those subgraphs to your graph nodes without allocating to them on-chain. This allows an Indexer to test the subgraph sync behaviour or simply pre-sync them entirely, before allocating, which means that the Indexer is immediately capable of serving fresh query data to consumers upon allocation.
  3. Monitor and contribute to the subgraph-health channel on Discord, where Indexers are sharing info on subgraph health and sync times.

:zap: Figment joins The Graph Ecosystem as a Core Developer :zap:

Figment has joined as the third Graph Protocol Core Developer team, via an 80M GRT Core Developer Grant over five years, aligning the team to support development of the technology as the protocol pushes further into the non-EVM blockchain space.

Figment will be contributing across the board bringing support for native network subgraphs, multiple non-EVM blockchains, Indexing performance improvements and playing an active role in core protocol improvement via governance. They will also migrate their existing data services product, DataHub, to The Graph. Their products span over 35 PoS networks.

The Figment team will be joining Indexer Office Hours on Tuesday August 3rd for a fireside chat and to give Indexers an opportunity to ask questions about the grant and the team’s short and long term plans.

StreamingFast Introduce The Firehose :ocean:

@abourget, Alexandre from StreamingFast has presented their ideas and knowledge around high performance indexing for everyone’s consumption and comments. This technology is critical to improving indexing performance significantly so we need to get as many engineer’s thoughts on this as possible, so please take some time to read and comment.

This will be the first of a series of RFCs by StreamingFast, so do check back to be part of the continued innovation.

:diamonds: Ethereum London Upgrade :diamonds:

The London Mainnet upgrade is scheduled for block 12965000, in approximately five days on August 4th 2021. Node operators must upgrade all their nodes to the latest releases for bug fixes and block number activation. A consensus bug was identified on Ropsten and subsequently fixed on the impacted clients, so it is critical that operators upgrade to the latest release of the impacted clients.

:raised_hands: Community Updates :raised_hands:

Wave 2 Grants
The Graph Foundation allocated over $2.8M to Grants and Ecosystem Support in Wave 2. A full breakdown of the funcing can be found in the link above.

Indexer RFPs
We have a list of RFPs (Request for Proposal) that specifically target initiatives and tools for Indexers. This is a continually updated list of ideas for tools and initiatives that we need to build out in order to improve an Indexer’s ability to perform well on the network.

The list is by no means complete and we are updating it constantly with new ideas that come to mind. If you would like to get involved with any of the RFPs or if have your own ideas for an RFP please reach out to @Pedro from the Foundation - pedro@thegraph.foundation

Erigon Indexing Working Group
The Erigon Indexing Working Group will be meeting on Thursdays @ 1000 Pacific, starting 5th August on Discord in the Office Hours voice chat. If you want to get set up with your own Erigon node and contribute to the process of making Erigon Mainnet-ready for Indexing, join us! You can find the meeting if you add info@thegraph.foundation to your calendar. This is a clinic and as such is not recorded.

queryFee Dynamics Working Group
The queryFee Dynamics Working Group meets every two weeks on Wednesday to openly discuss the maths behind the protocol with the aim of improving our ability to understand and gather the data required to optimize an Indexer’s query rebates. This is an exploratory working group so is not recorded. The next meeting is 11th August @ 1330 Pacific and the invite can be found by adding info@thegraph.foundation to your calendar.

New Community Call
Now that the Town Hall has become the Core Dev call, a new Community-focused call has started, lead by @Oliver and with contributions from community leaders across the ecosystem. More details on the call can be found on the forum.

Arbitration Charter
Interesting conversations are happening in and around Indexing activity on the edge of the protocol, activities that need to be well defined in terms of acceptable versus malicious, so arbitrators and disputers have clear guidance on the boundaries. Make sure you are up to speed on the conversations happening on the Arbitration Charter Thread.

The Graph Forums

Graph-related Social Media

That’s the highlights for the last month. If you have any feedback feel free to post below or get in contact with me on Twitter. See you in the next one.

8 Likes