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The Graph ecosystem is an open network producing the fastest, cheapest, most reliable way to access data for the blockchain economy. The ecosystem is backed by Edge & Node. The team includes a group of engineers from Amazon, MSFT, Google, MuleSoft, and more that have built truly decentralized infrastructure for decentralized applications (dApps) to run on. Moreover, the team is working on high-quality products for The Graph ecosystem. It is noteworthy that last month, The Graph network provided more than 30B app queries.
Recently, Abhiruk Bhattacharya, the community manager at The Coin Republic, has interviewed Tegan kline, the co-founder of Edge & Node. The session covered some interesting topics related to The Graph and the blockchain ecosystem. Kline has also shared some significant future plans for the ecosystem.
The Graph has an explosive growth story
The Graph was founded four years ago. And the idea of The Graph came about because Brandon Yanis and Univ all were going to build an application on Ethereum. And then they realized this very core piece of the stack was missing. And you could kind of do it in a centralized way. But then, what’s the point of building on a decentralized blockchain like Ethereum if the indexing and query layer is centralized, so they set out to build The Graph.
And here we are four years later, and The Graph launched the decentralized network in December. And it is Edge & Node’s first protocol. And in about 18 months, The Graph scale from 1 billion queries to about 25 billion queries, less than 1 billion queries.
So it’s just been explosive growth. And that speaks to the growth within the entire Web3 ecosystem because The Graph supports many different networks in the space layer: one blockchain layer, two blockchain storage networks, Oracle networks. I feel grateful because we get to interact with every ecosystem that exists in the blockchain space. And then dApp developers get to build applications and pull data using The Graph.
How is The Graph ecosystem helping?
It’s kind of like when you’re looking for a book in a library as an example, and imagine walking into the library, and all of those books are there, but they’re not sorted in alphabetical order. They’re just kind of thrown all over the place. And that was kind of like the data on Ethereum. Because the blockchains don’t natively index and query the data.
And so that’s where The Graph kind of comes in to help developers access data quickly, so that when you walk into that library, all the books are sorted in alphabetical order, and you can find your book in a second, or less than a second. And so, the Graph helped to bring users to Ethereum. And the Graph helps to decentralize Ethereum and other blockchains.
How does The Graph manage its way to several queries?
The Graph uses sub-Graphs, which are open APIs. And so that’s what the developers are picking up and using. The great thing about decentralized protocols like The Graph is it’s permissionless. And so no one needs to ask permission to use our built sub-Graph. And so if when building, there are any issues that anyone runs into you, a lot of developers will talk and ask in discord. And many people across the ecosystem can help not just within The Graph Foundation, or Edge & Node or fragment or streaming fast, but also across the community, as the developers help one another with any issues that come about. And it’s just great to see that kind of organic community form. But yes, anything that anyone needs, or any issues they run into, there’s so much support across the ecosystem.
What would a complete Web3.0 world look like?
Web3 is the decentralized Internet. And it’s what The Graph and many other protocols in this ecosystem are striving towards and building towards, and I believe that blockchains are the future of the Internet and that all of the centralized Internet or Web2 will move on to Web3.
And we already see that DeFi has proven price discoverability. DeFi was underpinned by The Graph and Ethereum, and other blockchains. And a lot of what happened in DeFi could not happen in the traditional finance space. And there’s just so much there’s an explosion of innovation that has happened and is continuing to happen. And now we see disruption in art via NFTs, governance via DAOs. And how we think about work and coordinating on the Internet is changing. How we think about organizations is changing.
And, the Internet started, I think, very pure, but what the Internet created and incentivized were these companies or applications, centralized applications like Facebook, Google that spun up. And I also think, like a lot of these companies, they had very pure intentions initially. But the problem is their monetization and where they monetize comes from gatekeeping data and in kind of selling ads or even selling on the ground. I’ve opened that up and made the data a public good. So with the sub-Graphs, they’re open APIs so that anyone can post any information to their application. Anyone can use sub-Graphs openly, and we see decentralized projects using sub-Graphs, but also centralized companies like CoinMarketCap CoinGecko, some of the most used websites in the entire pulling data from sub-Graphs like Uniswap, for example. And this is exploding, all innovation, and there’s just so much transparency. So it’s really exciting to see.
Is the ecosystem a Google of blockchain?
Like all of the world’s information was indexed by Google, you had all this great data on the Internet. But until Google came out with that index function and the search bar, you couldn’t access that information as a consumer, and it’s very similar in the blockchain space. So The Graph is indexing all of the world’s blockchain data.
And if you believe that blockchains are the future of the Internet, then The Graph will be there to index and query all of the Internet’s information on the blockchain. And all that information will be verifiable because it comes from the blockchain.
I think where it differs is that it is huge. It has a utility work token. And I think tokens are kind of the next evolution of the business model. Instead of revenue going Peer-to-Peer to a centralized company, it goes Peer-to-Peer to participants in the ecosystem. And so The Graph, the foundation or Edge & Node, no one collects fees based on that, what happens in that protocol, it all goes Peer-to-Peer. And so anyone participating in the ecosystem can earn commensurate with the value you’re bringing to the protocol, which I think is powerful.
And I also think that that’s something that’s missing from a lot of the traditional spaces, no traditional web to traditional finance, you know, I come from Wall Street. And as an analyst and investment banking, you work 100 hours a week, and you’ve paid the least you’re like the lowest on the total pole, but you work the most, and then you work your way up that pole so that you can kind of become a director, Managing Director work less and get paid more.
London Hardfork led to an increase in ETH price
I do believe we’re kind of moving into a multi-blockchain future. And it’s important to kind of unite that ecosystem. And The Graph is focused on interoperability at the indexing and query layer. And, today, there was an announcement with The Graph and The Graph foundation around donations to different Ethereum clients. And The Graph donated along with optimism in Uniswap, synthetics, and many others.
So that was exciting to see. I think it’s essential to support the projects in this space. But with the London hard fork, you know, I think it was great. It was great to kind of overcome that milestone that we were looking forward to for so long or forward to for so long with EIP1559. And I think now it’s all eyes on the merger with a theory of moving to ETH2.0 and, kind of Ethereum becoming the largest Proof-of-Stake network.
Bitcoin will have smart contracts functionality
I know a lot of Bitcoin maximalists are excited about DeFi coming to Bitcoin, and you know, I think there’s a lot of tribalism in this space. And I think the big Bitcoin maximalists are so important even though I’m not a Bitcoin maximalist. I think they’re crucial for this industry because they kind of hold the bar of the standard, but I believe it’s kind of a multi-blockchain future, and if we can bring DeFi to Bitcoin, that’s great.
Plans of the blockchain ecosystem
So with both of those core dev grants that you mentioned, streaming fast and Figment, we’re kind of building in a centralized way, in a similar space as The Graph. And I think over time, they realize they resonate with The Graph’s mission. And so that grant allowed them to focus on the ecosystem full time and kind of deprecate any competitive solutions or services, I should say, and focus on the graph mission.
And I think this just speaks to the power of decentralized protocols like no centralized product can compete with the power of decentralization. And it’s really exciting. There’s so much that’s coming up. As you mentioned, we are expanding more to other networks. So right now, the ecosystem-hosted service supports 24 different networks, a theory by Nance, smart chain, polygon, optimism, Arbitron.
And so some of the layer ones that we’re expanding to next are near Solana and Polkadot. And so this talent that is streaming fast and Figment has and brings to the graph ecosystem is unparalleled. There are not many people that are experts in indexing and improving indexing optimization. And so we’re excited that they’re contributing so much already. And I think we’ll be able to kind of expand to other networks much more quickly with the help of these different developer teams.
Crypto prices will continue to surge
I just try to stay focused on the technology and what we’re building, the innovation, and the number of people we can touch. And I think Bitcoin is inevitable. I am very bullish on Bitcoin, and a theory I’m kind of doing so much more than what’s already happened and I have been, for you know, over six years, and it’s great to see, you know, so many more people getting involved in this ecosystem.
And I know the price can attract people, but I hope that it does attract the kind of people who realize that there’s so much more beyond the price and it kind of gets involved in the different networks because there are so many ways you can kind of contribute to these different protocols and ecosystems to earn.
The Graph ecosystem helps earn passive income
You can delegate in The Graph network, earn passive income by helping to secure the network and helping indexers increase their stake, but you can also provide an LP on Uniswap. There are so many ways that you can get involved in all these different spaces. And it can be profound, and I hope it can kind of pull people away from their day jobs and they can become passionate about this space.
The Graph supports many different dApp developers across the ecosystem. There are over 23k developers now that have built over 22k sub-Graphs in the ecosystem. It’s one of the most used protocols in space.
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