Curator Cheat Sheet.
After having verified the accuracy of a subgraph, Curators are confronted with the challenge to evaluate its attractiveness. The main focus of this analysis lies on evaluating whether or not the subgraph will generate query fees and how high its revenue generating potential is in comparison to other relevatn subgraphs.
Your goal as a Curator is to assess which subgraphs are going to get query fees. You can evaluate the subgraph itself, but that doesn’t tell you who’s going to use it or if the actual project team is going to deploy their own subgraph later on. For this reason, the following cheat sheet focuses on helping you to better assess the attractiveness of a subgraph.
Overview
Query Traffic.
You can learn more about the (potential) demand of a subgraph by analyzing the underlying dApp that is going to be using the subgraph. Based on the dApp, you can evaluate the subgraph’s future query traffic. In the second step, try to estimate – based on your analysis – if the dApp will generate more query traffic and query fees over time or not.
Total Signal.
Before signaling on a subgraph, it is important to take a subgraphs total signal into account. Doing so will help you to understand if you are one of the first Curators to curate the subgraph or if you are already late to the show. Based on this, you will quickly see if it makes sense to signal your GRT or not. Keep in mind that your risk analysis should take the expected reward into account while weighing in the risk of signaling the subgraph with its present signal.
A subgraph may be highly attractive but if the total signal is already relatively high, you are exposing yourself to a high risk. If your assessment is correct, however, other Curators will come to the same conclusion and the subgraph will generate a high volume of queries, which increases the value of your curation shares.
Ideally, you are able to discover the subgraphs that are undersignaled but of high quality. One reason these subgraphs are undersignaled could be that they are not yet generating query fees as the project has not yet started querying the subgraph from its dApp.
Migration status.
In the early stages of curation, we find ourselves at a point in time where many subgraphs have migrated to the mainnet but are not live, yet. As such, these subgraphs are initially not generating query fees and may only become attractive once they are fully integrated into their live site. Curators that are able to identify such a subgraph with a high potential of generating large volumes of queries in the future may be rewarded for being early.
Application Field.
Another important factor to take into consideration is where the subgraph will be used. There are subgraphs that may only be used in one dApp, which serves a highly specialized function. Then there are subgraphs that are more generic and can serve a wider variety of purposes and data consumers. Curators will have to evaluate if the queries of a dApp-specific subgraph are higher than those of a generic subgraph that is queried by 3rd party dApps. When analyzing such subgraphs, it may also be helpful to take into consideration that subgraphs serving 3rd parties may be easily replacable by a better competing subgraph while a dApp-specific subgraph may be longer in use or get updated by its developers.
