This Month in Graph Indexing - March Edition
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.
The Graph’s Migration Path to Mainnet
The Graph Foundation has announced plans for the migration of subgraph traffic from the hosted service to mainnet indexers. The plan is broken into three phases: Migration bootstrapping starting with migration testing in April, followed by Production Dapps and finally the introduction of the Curation phase where developers will be able to publish subgraphs permissionlessly to mainnet and Curators will be able to signal on subgraphs to begin populating the Graph curation market.
Ethereum Berlin Upgrade
The Berlin upgrade has completed for Ropsten, Goerli and Rinkeby networks. Next up is Mainnet, expected on or around 14th April 2021. Please make sure that your Ethereum nodes, or Ethereum node providers, are upgraded prior to the fork block. Full details on the block number and client versions can be found here in Tim Beiko’s upgrade announcement post.
Indexers also have a regular node software discussion slot on Indexer Office Hours, so if you have any questions around upgrading your nodes, you can ask them in that session.
Know Your Indexer AMA Series 
The Know Your Indexer series organised by @ZuniM03 and @Ghostym is onto its seventh AMA and continues to provide Delegators with a space to meet and get to know Indexers within the Graph community. This week is the turn of Ryabina, a well-known node operator and contributor on many blockchains.
If you would like to get to know the Ryabina team you can ask your questions here.
Indexer Query Cost Modelling Workshop
The Indexer community has requested a Query Cost Modelling workshop and Zac from Edge & Node aka @That3Percent has kindly offered to arrange a workshop covering the process of creating and assessing query cost models.
If you would be interested in this workshop or have any questions or suggestions around the content, add your support and ask your questions here.
Indexer Office Hours Update
Office Hours acts as a critical meeting point where Indexers and other community members can get to know each other as well as the Edge & Node team members that are actively working on the Indexing software. Indexer Office Hours recently completed its sixth week of calls and has become an integral part of the discussions Indexers are having every week.
If you are interested in participating or just listening to the Office Hours recordings, you can find the details here.
Highlights from the Graph Forum
This month’s forum highlights will focus solely on guiding the reader through the discourse on the pressing issues of GIP0002 and GIP0004.
Firstly what does each proposal represent and how has the community responded to them:
GIP0002
Up to this point, Indexers have been unable to claim any revenue from Indexing whatsoever due to a development oversight. This proposal allows Indexers to access their new Indexer rewards as they earn them. There are some concerns that this introduces additional risk and inequality to the network. This GIP has already been through audit and received near unanimous support via Snapshot with some concerns from Delegators around equality of the reward mechanisms and some pushback from specific Indexers that highlighted possible risks the upgrade introduces to the network. Most participating in the discussion are in agreement that this upgrade is needed urgently in order that Indexers may finally receive some of their revenue after having none available to them for the ~100 days that mainnet has been live, plus the months before that on Mission Control testnet in 2020.
GIP0004
Introduced at short notice via a Council Meeting, GIP0004 aims to address the same issue as GIP0002 but also mitigate some of the risks that were identified around GIP0002. This would enable indexers to access their new indexer rewards but with a 28 day thaw period. Although this is a new proposal, Indexers are taking strong issue with the fact that GIP0004 is being explored as superceding GIP0002 for a number of reasons including significant delay due to audit resourcing for GIP0004, some opinion that the outlined risks associated with GIP0002 do not warrant any further delay in resolving the core issue, especially now that the migration path to mainnet has been announced. Some Indexers are also of the opinion that the 28 day thaw is unacceptable at this point due to the complete lack of revenue for Indexers and so should not be considered now, but potentially in the future as part of an upgrade to align the reward mechanism appropriately between stakeholders (Indexers, Delegators, Curators).
Key posts in the discussion:
- Ariel from E&N introduces the GIP0002 proposal and community discusses it at length - link
- Alex, representing Indexer P2P, describes a potential economic exploit with GIP0002 and the community responds to the idea - link
- Brandon from E&N outlines the outcome of the last Council Meeting - a proposal for GIP0004 with reasoning for proposing this over GIP0002 - link
- Pete, representing Indexer LunaNova, makes a strong argument against GIP0004 based on constant delaying of a resolution to the matter at hand, accessing Indexer rewards. Indexers follow up Pete’s post confirming their position, describing how they are at risk of having to shut down operations in order to cover their operational and tax obligations from locked Indexer rewards and how they cannot understand why a new GIP would even be considered following the discussions, snapshot and audit work done for GIP0002. - link
- Indexer and Council member Jim Cousins / cryptovestor emphasizes that realistic timelines for GIP0004 mean that Indexers will be expected to deliver into the migration to mainnet while still having no access to revenue and that this issue must be resolved in order to have a healthy network going into migration - link
- Indexer and Council member Gary Morris / fattox adds to the urgency of the situation, detailing some history around the original issue and the risk of losing smaller indexers due to continued delays on resolving the problem. Gary also expresses some concerns, first discovered by @Indexer_Payne, around how thawing would work in GIP0004 and that those concerns need to be put to rest before making a decision on GIP0004 vs GIP0002. - link
- Delegator and admin in Graphtronauts Telegram group @Oliver provides some additional insight into the Snapshot data for GIP0002 demonstrating that the Delegator community largely supported GIP0002 - link
- Brandon from E&N provides a response to the new community discussions, emphasizing that the enthusiastic discussion around GIP0002 vs GIP0004, plus the delays, are being taken very seriously, and this issue is top priority right now. Brandon outlined a potential plan to fast track a Council vote on implementing GIP0004 or GIP0002 and a timeline for how this could be achieved. - link
That’s the highlights for the last month. If you have any feedback for the “This Month in…” updates feel free to post below or get in contact with me on Twitter. See you in the next one.