Core Developer Teams.

The Graph is pioneering a new frontier of collaborative innovation where communities and companies are aligned to build a radically more open Internet. As such, there is not a centralized entity in control of developing The Graph protocol. Instead, multiple core developer teams are simultaneously working on The Graph.

Let’s have a look at each team what they do

The idea behind The Graph Network was conceived and given shape by Graph Protocol, Inc. After having launched The Graph Network’s mainnet  on December 17th, 2020, Graph Protocol, Inc. changed its name to Edge & Node. The intention behind this change is to highlight the ongoing decentralization of the network. As such, Edge & Node is no longer the central core developer team developing and promoting the protocol. Instead, Edge & Node provides services to the ecosystem and is involved in expanding the protocol.

StreamingFast is a protocol infrastructure company known for its proficiency at building highly scalable, crosschain architecture to stream blockchain data. The $60M Core Dev Grant awarded by the foundation is the first of its kind and pioneers a new frontier of collaborative innovation.

StreamingFast has proven themselves as experts in building adaptive infrastructure and providing important API services. StreamingFast will contribute developer resources and talent to advance The Graph Protocol and its ecosystem. Relevant IP and products created as part of the grant will be open-sourced under The Graph Protocol Github repo. API products are migrated to The Graph Network for backend indexing and providing querying support. As a team helping with core protocol development, StreamingFast works alongside Edge & Node, Indexers, and the entire community to help with Graph Node improvements. StreamingFast also contributes to governance and the GIP process aside from providing support for subgraph feature development.

Semiotic AI is comprised of individuals with experience in AI and cryptography. The company has been contributing to The Graph core research by creating automation tooling for query negotiations through reinforcement learning (RL) as well as AI-based determination of query costs and query latency prediction. The Semiotic AI team also open sourced an Indexer Stress Test tool and has built an AI-powered query generator.

The 8-year grant by The Graph Foundation enables Semiotic to expand their capacity to work on new focus areas. These areas include verifiable queries with optimized zk-SNARKs libraries and decentralizing query cost prediction via neural networks. Semiotic will also work with other core dev teams in The Graph ecosystem on research and development, with a special focuse on artificial intelligence and cryptography.

The Guild is renowned for building GraphQL tooling utilized by top Fortune 500 companies and the open-source community. With deep roots in open-source development, The Guild contributes to the GraphQL community and developed important open-source libraries, like GraphQL Mesh.

GraphQL is a widely-used query language for APIs built on top of other protocols. It was developed internally by Facebook in 2012 before being publicly released in 2015. The Guild is a part of the GraphQL Foundation and contributed imporant libaries to the reference implementation of GraphQL. Over the last 6 years, The Guild has become one of the most experienced GraphQL dev groups in the world.

The GraphOps team brings a wealth of experience to The Graph ecosystem, spanning across protocol design, infrastructure, and systems orchestration. The team members are proven indexing experts, having been active community members since the testnet. The work of GraphOps will expand the quality of service and capacity of The Graph Network and the capabilities of Indexers as the decentralized network scales.

Chris Wessels is joined by Juan Defango, Ana Calin, Abel Tedros, and Petko Pavlovski. Their  contribution to The Graph ecosystem gives them the depth of experience and firsthand knowledge of the protocol to provide best-in-class resources and tooling to optimize Indexer experience.

GraphOps has long contributed to The Graph ecosystem, making a significant push to expand resources and education. GraphOps provides a broad range of services to The Graph ecosystem.

The Graph Foundation has awarded Messari a $12.5mm grant to become the first Core Subgraph Developer in the ecosystem. With the grant, Messari can contribute its developer talent to develop and maintain high-quality, accurate, complex, and standardized protocol subgraphs. All subgraphs will be open source and available for the broader community of The Graph.

Pinax is a web3 data company focused on enabling true web3 independence. The team has been engineering blockchain data analytics and processing tools since 2018 and operates its own robust infrastructure, managing bare metal hardware across multiple hosted data centers. Pinax has over three years of experience operating a sophisticated Firehose-related tech stack.

Geo is helping communities organize knowledge and information directly on The Graph. Information is organized via Geo into a Knowledge Graph structure which is the most flexible way of representing information.

Listed for completeness

Figment is one of the world’s largest blockchain infrastructure and services providers serving customers worldwide.