coindesk.com
Indexing protocol The Graph’s GRT token surpassed a $1 billion market capitalization again on Sunday, according to data from CoinMarketCap. The spike reflects the platform’s significant ecosystem growth in 2022, particularly during the fourth quarter.
The token began to climb at the beginning of 2023 after plummeting in the second half of 2022, and is now trading at around $0.13, up 55% over the last seven days. GRT had risen above $5 billion in market value before spiraling as the wider crypto market started tumbling in late 2021.
The Graph removes the need for data consumers like app developers to expand complex infrastructure for gathering on-chain data. It currently supports indexing data from 26 different blockchain networks, including Ethereum, Near, Arbitrium, Optimism, Polygon, Avalanche, Celo, Fantom, Moonbeam and IPFS.
The two main sources of revenue for the project are inflationary indexing rewards and query fees paid by data consumers, according to a Messari February report on the protocol.
Data from the report showed that in the fourth quarter of 2022, The Graph witnessed a 66% quarter-over-quarter increase in GRT revenue from query fees (In USD terms this amounts to a 5% QoQ increase and a 265% year-over-year rise.) The report also noted that query fees “should continue to increase as more subgraphs are migrated to mainnet in the coming quarters.”
Some analysts also attributed GRT’s rally to its link to Artificial-Intelligence (AI) related tokens, which have been surging recently due to the ChatGPT effect. CoinMarketCap’s rankings of the “most valuable AI and big data crypto projects and tokens” currently has The Graph as the leading platform in market capitalization. According to Pablo Jodar, a crypto analyst at GenTwo, “I think it is linked to the rally on AI stocks, due to the chatgpt effect.”
The platform raised $50 million in a funding round that was led by Tiger Global Management in January 2022.