Hey Graph’ers!
Are you ready for a special AMA with members of the core dev teams working on The Graph’s new roadmap - the New Era of The Graph? This isn’t just a new chapter for The Graph—it marks a transformative evolution in the world of web3, aiming to empower developers, boost the ecosystem, and redefine what’s possible with decentralized data.
📅 Join this special AMA from Tuesday, November 28, to Wednesday, November 30, 2023.
Because core dev team members span multiple time zones, responses to your questions will be staggered, offering a continuous and evolving dialogue over three days. Feel free to ask questions at your convenience and return often to see new answers and participate in the ongoing discussions. Community members and moderators from The Graph’s Reddit channel will be on hand to guide the AMA and ensure your questions are addressed.
Meet the AMA participants, all from the core dev teams at The Graph:
- Adam Fuller - Product Manager, Edge & Node
- Alex Bourget - Co-founder & CTO, StreamingFast
- Chris Wessels - Founder, GraphOps
- Daniel Keyes - Founder & CEO, Pinax
- Eva Beylin - Director, The Graph Foundation
- Sam Green - Co-founder & Head of Research, Semiotic Labs
- Uri Goldshtein - Founder, The Guild
- Vincent Wen - Engineering Manager, Messari
- Yaniv Tal - Founder & CEO, Geo
✨ The New Era promises a suite of new data services and features that are set to drive the next generation of decentralized applications. Additionally, from new tooling, features, updates, and upgrades, The Graph is empowering developers and ecosystem contributors. You can read the official announcement here and on Twitter.
The roadmap is structured around five core objectives:
- World of Data Services: Expanding beyond subgraphs to deliver a rich market of data services on the network (i.g., new query languages, LLMs, etc.)
- Developer Empowerment: Supporting developers through enhanced DevEx and tooling (e.g., Sunrise of Decentrzalized Data, upgrade Indexer, etc.)
- Protocol Evolution and Resiliency: Delivering a more resilient, flexible, and efficient protocol
- Optimized Indexer Performance: Boosting Indexer performance with improved tooling and operational capabilities
- Interconnected Graph of Data: Creating tools for composable data and organized knowledge graph
At the center of The Graph protocol is the power of community - so let’s hear your thoughts, feedback, and of course, answer any questions you may have about this New Era. Whether you’re curious about specific features, the roadmap’s objectives, or how you can get involved, the core devs are here to chat.
🌐 So, let’s dive in - ask the core devs anything about The New Era of The Graph!
Please note that this AMA will adhere to this channel’s Moderation & Administration Policy:
https://www.reddit.com/r/thegraph/comments/l0t81p/welcome_to_the_official_subreddit_for_the_graph/
By this time next year, what key milestones and aspirations do you hope The Graph Protocol will have achieved? Additionally, looking further ahead, what are some stretch goals or ambitious projects you foresee for The Graph in the upcoming years, especially in addressing emerging needs in the decentralized data space?
Hey u/PaulieB79, Daniel Keyes here, CEO of Pinax. Thanks for the question!
Quite simply, by this time next year, I expect The Graph to be serving many more blockchains and many more data sources.
As we enter the new era, The Graph has the opportunity to achieve network effects and service levels unrivaled by any centralized data service provider, serving developers and data consumers with an ever-expanding set of data services and data sources built and hosted by a thriving ecosystem of core developers, service providers, and community members collaborating to bring this mission to life.
To learn more about what Pinax is doing to achieve this vision, visit our blog and read up on the future of the world of data services and how to navigate the chain integration process.
Hi u/PaulieB79! This is Sam Green from Semiotic Labs. Thanks for the question!
Here are some milestones I would like to see Semiotic achieve in the coming year:
Hey Paulie. Chris from GraphOps here. Thanks for your question!
At GraphOps we’re particularly excited about the protocol evolving to support a world of Data Services. This shift, from a single enshrined tech stack that can’t possibly meet every use case, to a diverse marketplace of data services, underscores the ecosystem’s commitment to make The Graph the foundational data layer of Web3.
There are so many exciting Data Services on the Horizon, but I have to make mention of GraphOps’ focus on File Data Service (FDS). FDS is a marketplace to share and monetise file data. Naturally, this has very broad applicability, but our initial focus is on supporting the real needs of Indexers within the Graph ecosystem today. Indexers are large-scale infrastructure operators, dealing with many terabytes of data. Much of this data is in the form of files: database backups, archive node snapshots and Firehose flatfiles. For Indexers that have already generated this data, FDS allows them to generate additional revenue by selling it to other Indexers. For Indexers that don’t yet have this data, it’s highly likely that someone will be willing to sell it to them at a cost that is lower than the cost of recreating it from scratch. This should increase the efficiency of The Graph, reducing time-to-data for Indexers and bolstering revenues.
In a year from now, we’d like to see FDS being actively used by Indexers to monetise and share their file data. Beyond the marketplace itself, we’d also like to see tooling developed that sits on top of FDS which automates adjacent actions like restoring a subgraph database backup from a file, and provides a seamless UX for Indexers to bootstrap a Subgraph or Firehose using data from FDS.
We’re also very excited about our ongoing work on Launchpad, our Kubernetes Toolkit for Indexers. We continue to believe that Kubernetes-centric infrastructure tooling is a critical piece of the puzzle to scale The Graph, and we’re actively working on adding Firehose and Substreams support to Launchpad. Next year, we’re excited to support both of these, alongside SQL, Files, and other emerging Data Services.
Outside of new Data Services, we’re excited to continue to see Graphcast impact the network positively in the areas of data determinism and network intelligence.
This barely scratches the surface of the developments that are being worked on across the Core Developer ecosystem, and we’re thrilled to be working alongside so many other smart and determined teams. Watch this space!
Hey Paulie, this is Vincent from Messari. Thank you for your question!
Our focus will continue to be around completing our subgraph coverage, both in terms of breadth (more chains supported, more diversified protocols types, more protocols) and in terms of depth (more data and deeper data for each protocol). In particular, we are expanding our coverage to some of the more “bespoke” protocols that don’t fit into our standardized schema particularly well. For example, FriendTech subgraph is one we built recently that exposes a lot of interesting data, despite it not fitting into any of the standardized protocol types we support.
Over the course of next year and into the years ahead, we are also super excited about adding SQL capabilities to The Graph ecosystem and enabling analytics use cases. We are seeing a lot of interest in this, and is also something we’ve always wanted at Messari. We will be building on top of the great work that are currently underway by Streamingfast and Semiotic, and potentially build standardized SQL-based “subgraphs” in a more composable way using DBT and Clickhouse.