3 months in The Graph community: from ICO to mainnet launch.
Tags: Web3, The Graph Protocol, The Graph, Dapps, Blockchain

I found out about the graph about 3 months ago not long before the ico from my friend. Then I went to their website and began to study what they are doing. I am not a programmer and did not immediately understand the value of the project.

Remind you that the main task of the graph is indexing and extracting data from the blockchain

For those who do not know, this is a rather problematic operation that requires a lot of labor. When I found out that, I joined the community and plunged into the project headlong. By the way, who is interested in the code, here is an article from Andre Cronje

What I liked right away was the almost finished product. There was only no decentralized network. At first, all data was processed according to a centralized scheme.

Subgraph & explorer

Next, I want to tell you what a subgraph is. This is the backend for the application. It consists of data files. They contain code that describes the algorithm for the entire circuit. For example, here is a link to the Uniswap exchange subgraph, which indexes transaction data, and this is a link to their frontend.

The next component of the system is the subgraph explorer. This is a directory with all created subgraphs. Now there are about 3500 of them and together they generate about 350 million requests per day! The main consumers of graph services are applications. They provide data to their clients. While all this works for free.

I will not tell you how the entire graph ecosystem works, this is a topic for a separate article. You can study it yourself on their website.

ICO

The team ran their own ico. These were the three phases of the graph token sale. There were many participants and the sale ended at the beginning of the second phase. Despite the very heavy load, the site did not crash. And everything worked very well with no glitches or freezes. Later it became known that the site was made using a subgraph. After such a successful sale, the graph received even more likes from the community.

Community

From the outset, the team stressed the importance of this issue. At the moment, the graph is used by 6000 developers, 2000 curators, 200 indexers. All the guys are very smart and creative. I can say from myself that this is one of the best communities that I have seen. I think this is primarily the merit of the team and its policies. I hope everything will be the same further. 2 months and 4 phases of preparation for the launch of the main network, curators and indexers performed various tasks. Indexers tested the network. Curators learned how to evaluate and create subgraphs, wrote guides and created content. I have never been so deeply immersed in a project. It was very interesting. I am sure that many have improved their knowledge and skills at this stage. The mainnet launch is scheduled for late December 2020.

The future of the project

The project is actively developing. This is evidenced by the growing number of network requests. A very important partnership with chainlink. I explain why it’s cool. The chainlink loads the data into the blockchain, then the graph indexes it and extracts it conveniently. It is a complete data processing and storage system. These are huge opportunities for the development of the ether ecosystem as a whole. In December, the team launched a grant program for the development of the project. Everyone can take part. If you have any ideas welcome.

I think this is just the beginning. The era of WEB3 has already arrived. More decentralized apps and exciting events await us in 2021.