The Graph’s role in Web3
Tags: The Graph, GraphQL, Web3, Grt

Web 1.0 to Web3

Web3 has come a long way since the emergence of Bitcoin over a decade ago. Despite using an outdated tech by today’s standards, it carved in stone the principles of Web3, of which the main ones are decentralization and true P2P interaction without intermediaries (centralized authorities) such as Google or Facebook. But many people are still confused about Web3 and its potential nonetheless, so here’s a quick recap of the technological progression:

If the retrospectively-named “Web 1.0” comprised read-only static webpages in the 90s and early 2000s, Web 2.0 (read-write web) has allowed for a more interactive user experience fuelled by participatory systems. It has (very likely) peaked with the arrival and development of social media. But in Web 2.0 the user is still the prisoner of centralized authorities. If you want to talk to a friend, you would probably use Facebook or one of the other centralized platforms. The so-called internet giants run a plethora of services and have access to many if not all aspects of user data. These “middlemen” control the data and that entails a certain degree of censorship, corruption, and a sense of foreboding akin to the sword of Damocles hanging over your private data. The purpose of Web3 (Web 3.0 or unmediated read-write web) is to get rid of the arbitrary centralized authority and create composable decentralized infrastructure (imagine lego blocks that you can use to construct all sorts of toys, or use a lego model to build on top of it or reshape it). In short, Web3 is often seen as a pet name for a theoretical, completely serverless decentralized web with increased security, anonymity, interoperability, reliability, governing solutions, automation and tokenization.

The Graph

The Graph is an indexing protocol for querying data on blockchain. It is often referred to as “the google of blockchain” because of its complementary nature to most Web3 projects that are being developed on blockchain. As a blockchain agnostic baseline infrastructure protocol servicing the Web3, it is extremely versatile and one of the cornerstones of the Web3 ecosystem. One way to see it is as a tokenized GraphQL for Web3 applications. Web 2.0 apps all need data base querying. This is how Facebook knows what is on everyone’s profile, what Twitter has for your tweet back on December 22th, 2016 etc. Virtually every complex Web 2.0 app uses this. GraphQL is a SQL on steroids because it doesn’t require much computational resources within your application and is easier to integrate once you learn it. As a query and interface definition language its purpose is to surpass the inflexibility and inefficiency of REST API. On Web3 GraphQL is so far being used in the DeFi industry to index data from the Ethereum blockchain brought on by Chainlink.

Another way to look at it is as the Unreal Engine, but for APIs. Unreal Engine lets game developers build video games without having to develop their own engine. They simply pay a fee to use the Unreal Engine and then they get to spend their time immediately creating games upon the game engine. The Graph Protocol is analogous to that, but instead of video games it’s dApps and instead of a video game engine it’s an API.

Why Is The Graph Critical To Web3?

The Graph aims to accelerate the development of dApps by allowing developers (users) to efficiently query data for the requirements of an application. While traditional APIs have to make distinct calls to get the information required and thus tend to congest the network, GraphQL is efficient enough to provide the needed data in a single query.

With this in mind, it’s fairly clear why The Graph’s future is bright. The data indexed by The Graph’s API (subgraphs) is relayed to smart contracts via Chainlink oracles, which allows the developers to use the indexed data to build powerful dApps. As Google is an indexing epitome of Web 2.0, The Graph has the first-mover advantage in indexing the Web3 space. Prior to the wide-spread adoption of The Graph, developers were force to come up with their own indexing code and maintain servers that was anchored on centralized infrastructure. The drawbacks of that were unreliability (servers might shut down for various reasons), maintenance costs and security risks. With subgraphs, all this becomes more efficient, decentralized, reliable and secure.

The Graph currently has over 200 indexers and over 1,600 individuals have learnt to identify high-quality subgraphs. The usage of subgraphs has increased exponentially over the past few months: from 1 billion monthly queries in June 2020 to over 10 billion in November 2020. Currently the network can support 1,000–2,000 queries per second. Subgraphs are persistently being used by some of the biggest applications such as Uniswap, PoolTogether, Curve, Zapper and many more. The explosive launch of mainnet only serves as a testament to The Graph’s contribution to the Web3 space. In the foreseeable future, the project will expand to other blockchains (apart from Ethereum) to increase the scope of usage and accelerate interoperability.

Website: https://thegraph.com/

GRT Token Address: 0xc944e90c64b2c07662a292be6244bdf05cda44a7