What a fantastic day for DeFi. No, wait! What a phenomenal day for Ethereum. Woah woah woah, wait! What an epic day for all of crypto!
Today marks the launch of The Graph Mainnet. The Graph is a necessary tool for the Ethereum space handling thousands of query requests per second for dapps of all shapes and sizes.The Graph is an indexing protocol for querying data on networks like Ethereum and IPFS. It powers thousands of applications in both DeFi and Web3 ecosystem. The great thing about The Graph is anyone can build and publish open APIs, called subgraphs. These applications can then be queried using GraphQL to get vital blockchain data. For the first couple years The Graph lived on a hosted platform with potential for critical failures due to centralization risks but now with the launch of mainnet will be more robust and distributed globally thanks to hundreds of indexers located all around the world. The Graph is used for dapps like Uniswap, Synthetix, Aragon, AAVE, Gnosis, Balancer, Livepeer, DAOstack, Decentraland and thousands of others. But that isn't even the crazy part! The Graph usage has been growing at over crazy rates and recently did somewhere in the ballpark of 10 Billion queries in November.
The Graph is built up of a core team who started the project and an inspirational community of thousands from 100+ countries. There are investors from the public sale, indexers who run hardware and software to handle the network, delegators who essentially stake based on Indexer strength, and curators who signal strength of well developed and useful subgraphs. All together this project brings together talents of all kinds to accomplish the dream of all crypto enthusiasts, an open Web3 ecosystem.
Now to The Graph's native token $GRT. GRT is what indexers stake and delegators/curators signal with to prove they have skin in the game essentially creating incentivized tokeneconomics for participants in the network. GRT has a Total Supply of 10,000,000,000 tokens with an initial supply of just over 1,200,000,000 tokens. More information on the token distribution and economics can be found in the link provided. With all the major exchanges such as Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Uniswap, Huobi, and many others already listing or in the process of listing GRT, anyone interested in participating in the network can easily do so.
