Blockchains contain a vast sea of information and data, both useful and useless. Collecting this data can be very time consuming and costly for developers, The Graph is built to fix this, doing what Google did for the internet, for the blockchains.
Background
Graph is very new blockchain, it was launched at the end of 2020. Considering how fresh this new chain is, it has seen significant growth. It launched and is currently operating mainly on the Ethereum blockchain and its Dapps. The initial launch was powered by a closed ICO with Multicoin, DTC capital & Coinbase, with a total value of 12 million dollars. The chain launched with 10 billion tokens with a on going release to indexers as staking and performance rewards of 3% annually. During the year the chain has added support (beta) for BSC, polygon, Near, Celo, Avalanche, Fantom and few others.
Network
Graph is powered by indexers that create sub-graphs with information, anyone can be an indexer and build these which contribute to a decentralised web of data. Graph functions as the main indexer and can gather data from any number of Dapps or blockchains, indexers simply group these indexes together to give relevant information to anyone that query it. Indexers are put against each other to compete for providing the best data for the lowest price possible. There's also an extra level of quality validation with curators being able to deposit GRT to subgraphs they find be the most useful/accurate, they get a portion of rewards for every subgraph they correctly curate.
Use cases
The Graph is essentially a tool set that allows users to build and gather hubs of data accessible by APY. Indexers gather this data and is rewarded in GRT based on how accurate and quickly they can do so. Curators select and make investments into sub graphs they find the most useful. Any user or developer wishing to query data from the blockchain does so by paying ETH or the network equivalent. Payments are sent through gateways, which are ran either by the team behind The Graph or private users. Most of the Dapps today gathers or queries their data from either centralized servers or a self ran server, similar to how developers queried data at the early stages of the internet.
The Graph today
The need for Graph is great as the usage of the protocol has grown immensely. The first few months of the Graph being live it managed to get 4 billion monthly queries per month. It's a strong project with a very sought after use case, being able to search and query data through a decentralized system as opposed to a centralized one. The Graph has also partnered up with Chainlink so that queried data can be sent through smart contracts through Chainlink, this partnership aims to further improve performance and available data for both protocols.
The main drawback one can see for the Graph is that actual usage of the protocol isn't paid for with the native token, meaning that higher usage doesn't necessarily result in higher GRT value. I do, however, believe that the protocol will remain strong and be a good contender for where you should put your fiat.
Pros:
- Strong decentralized protocol
- Quick and accurate data
- Strong developer tool
Cons:
- Doesn't utilize the native token for payments
- Still fairly centralized
- Low number of blockchains supported