The Graph Mainnet and Beyond

Even the best ideas in DeFi and the most impressive decentralized applications are considerably restrained in their potential without a functioning Web3 infrastructure. Without this underlying architecture, the development of the entire Web3 ecosystem is lagging behind the very centralized and pervasive competitors it seeks to replace.

When the mainnet of The Graph Network was launched on December 17th, 2020, it paved the way for truly decentralized applications. The Graph Protocol enables developers around the world to successfully compete against incumbents. By using The Graph’s GraphQL API, developers of dApps are empowered to reach the desired product market fit in a drastically shorter time span, which contributes to the growth of the entire Web3 and DeFi ecosystem.

The mainnet launch was the highlight of an exciting year with numerous exciting developments in the ecosystem. Here’s a quick recap of everything that happened in late 2020:

With the inauguration of The Graph Council, the underlying governance process was announced. To start, the council will be a 6-of-10 multisig with five stakeholder groups represented: Indexers, Users, Researchers, Backers and Initial Team. It functions as a representative sample of stakeholders across multiple organizations with varying viewpoints and incentives.

As the network grows, the governance process will iterate and further decentralize, with the aim to increase representation via nested multi-sigs or a DAO.

After having successfully launched the mainnet of The Graph Network, Graph Protocol, Inc. decided to change its name to Edge & Node. This marks an important step towards the ongoing decentralization of the network.

Edge & Node will continue to provide services to the ecosystem but is no longer the central team behind developing and promoting the protocol.

We’ve also had the very first community Q&A in which some pretty interesting questions were asked. So let’s discuss some interesting parts of the Q&A.

First of all we had an interesting question about whether or not the graph is planning to co-operate with other blood chain platforms like Dfinity, Polkadot and Cosmos. And I found the answer by Tegan Klein quite interesting so I’m going to quote it to you. What she said was:

The Graph hosted service supports Ethereum, IPFS, and POA. Currently, The Graph Network supports Ethereum. This being said, The Graph is blockchain agnostic and we are here to unite the entire Web3 ecosystem. We have been speaking to all of the top Layer 1 blockchains, many of whom have offered us grants to integrate The Graph’s decentralized indexing layer on their blockchain. We plan to expand to other blockchains in the near future.

The team was also asked if there are important use cases that are worth highlighting.
Tegan Klein answered this question again and she highlighted how the graph is solving a huge pain point for developers that are building applications in the web3 ecosystem. She said that The Graph is currently one of the most used protocols in the blockchain space today, right after Ethereum and IPFS. She also mentioned that there’s a community of over 6000 developers that have already built more than 3400 subgraphs and have deployed them for applications like Aaragon, Balancer, Synthetix, AAVE, Gnoses, DAOstack and Uniswap.

With the inauguration of The Graph Council, the underlying governance process was announced. To start, the council will be a 6-of-10 multisig with five stakeholder groups represented: Indexers, Users, Researchers, Backers and Initial Team. It functions as a representative sample of stakeholders across multiple organizations with varying viewpoints and incentives.

As the network grows, the governance process will iterate and further decentralize, with the aim to increase representation via nested multi-sigs or a DAO.