Why this is only the beginning for The Graph

I had a lot of good feedback and discussions following my last article on how to curate for The Graph. Since then, a lot has happened. After completing the Curator missions, The Graph just went live on the main net. With that came the launch of the GRT token, which is now live for trading for investors, indexers, The Graph employees, and Curators.

As I was writing this, the fully diluted market cap climbed from $1.3b to $4b. If you are one of the many who are only now hearing about GRT and The Graph, you may feel like you are too late to join the party. The good news is that this is only the beginning and the future looks bright.

Why I believe in The Graph

The numbers of queries speak for themselves:

The number and quality of projects that query subgraphs to get data prove that it is a useful system for nearly every major project in crypto. But, what I find most interesting here how engaged the community is, and how The Graph has structured community engagement to be an open, inclusive way of sharing the wealth generated by the system to you incentivize people to learn about how the system works and participate in making it better.

Fairer launches like The Graph’s and Uniswap’s are a forcing function that is making it harder for huge entities to hoard all of the gains from the creation of a widely-used system for themselves. Traditionally companies try to capture a market for themselves by beating the competition, then increase prices to seek rent.

Because these are open-source systems run by anyone who wants to participate, the systems must stay honest because they can be easily forked and modified into a system that favors its users more. By sharing the ownership of a system with it’s users, you engage the community in stewardship of the system and prevent a tiny minority from holding ALL of the cards and seeking rent. This results in a better product for customers, a better result for participants/workers, and still allows for the company and investors to profit and scale their companies.

The Graph is a community-owned gold mine

If data is gold, decentralized data feeds are a community-owned gold mine. Any public blockchain data people want will be easily available through a set of public APIs. Any person who is able to index the data for easier consumption will be able to profit. Any person who can find, filter, and transform data into more useful representations can profit. It is a system with an open, decentralized workforce.

The Graph has made accessing data on Ethereum easier, but the goal should be to make it trivially easy to query data from any language for use in any type of application on any and all platforms. Right now most of the tutorials and instructions are geared towards querying for data in a react dapp. Clear examples for other languages: python, PHP, C#, Unity, etc. Will make it even easier to consume the information that The Graph has transformed and indexed. And Ethereum data is just the start, there’s no reason the same concept can’t be applied to other chains and/or sources of data. What Google did for internet data, The Graph is trying to do for blockchain data.

Crypto is not just eating finance, it will eat all public data

The first applications that have been really successful in crypto have been financial services. The reason is that when you have a fee based on data transferred rather than dollar value transferred, you can easily and cheaply scale when the amount of value transferred is very large. The fees in terms of percent of the transaction value are very low if you are sending a million USD worth of ETH.

A short list of data available already:

• Crypto asset price, volume, and trade history through Uniswap and other dexes for tens of thousands of assets
• Key metrics for DeFi like APY, TVL, volume, etc. from Compound, Curve, Aave, etc.
• Estimates of the probabilities of future events from Augur and Polymarket
• Governance actions of decentralized systems like Aragon
• NFT sales and owners from places like Rarible and Gods Unchained

The next use cases of ETH will mature as the fees drop. Currently centralized databases like coinmarketcap/coingecko will move to decentralized web3 data sources on The Graph. Eventually, so will things with lower USD value per transaction, including social networks, content distribution, compute resource sharing, gaming, and more. When the cost to store data securely on-chain is reduced and networks can scale to serve more data, The Graph will be there ready to index it, curate it, and distribute it.

How will The Graph evolve in the future?

Once blockchains are indexed and easy to query, off-chain data sources can easily follow. But, it needs to become even easier to consume the data. For example, it is a lot simpler to query a GET HTTPS endpoint than it is to construct the appropriate POST to query the server with the GraphQL query. Allowing simple get requests for subgraph data allows people to more easily play around with the endpoint in their browser. We need something like Remix Ethereum, where you can very quickly and easily start developing, testing, and deploying subgraphs without needing to set up a dev environment. We need more tools to automatically analyze subgraphs for data accuracy and quality.

So, what’s next?

The Graph is really on to something here, and I’m glad they took the steps to decentralize the project after running an extremely successful centralized service, first. They could have raised ever larger rounds until they IPO’d, like Coinbase, but instead they are transforming and scaling in a new way: one that includes many more people than just Silicon Valley investors and startup founders and early employees. This will allow The Graph to scale along with the whole crypto industry.

I think fair distributions based on engagement, understanding, and usage are the future. Like Uniswap, The Graph did a fair launch of the GRT token, sharing a lot of it with community members who now have the GRT and experience to Curate subgraphs and stake GRT to signal Indexers on the good sources of data. If any participant does a good job, they can earn a profit. Anyone with an internet connection and the skills to do it can participate.

I think that this kind of decentralized workforce/community/herd of cats is a glimpse into the future of a new kind of company, and it is really exciting to be on the ground floor and see it unfold in real time.