Hosted Service

The Road to Sunsetting the Hosted Service.

The process of sunsetting the Hosted Service is dependent on having specific criteria met:

The process is driven by specific exit criteria and Indexer readiness via the MIPs program, not dates any longer – developers should not expect chains to undergo depreciation phases until the necessary quality of service, core functionality and developer experience are offered on the decentralized network.
Source: https://thegraph.com/blog/transitioning-to-decentralized-graph-network/

Subgraphs that are querying data from Ethereum are migrating to the decentralized network right now. Therefore, ETH will be the first chain for which support on the Hosted Service will be ended (once the criteria are being met). Gnosis is in beta on the decentralized network right now. Polygon is being tested via the MIPs progam so this will not be free for that much longer.

Please note: The end of Q1 2023 reflects the sunsetting timeline only for The Graph Network-supported chains. As non-mainnet chains become supported on The Graph Network, their hosted service equivalents will sunset gradually to ensure developers have time to migrate subgraphs to the decentralized network. Stay up to date on which chains are supported by The Graph Network here.

Sunsetting of the Hosted Network

The hosted service was critical to The Graph’s decentralization journey, achieving product-market-fit and testing subgraph features with developers. Sunsetting the service is the greatest milestone since The Graph Network launched, and will enable all web3 applications to retrieve blockchain data in a truly decentralized way.

Moving to a fully decentralized network that supports querying across chains is the web3 future that The Graph has been building towards. At Graph Day, Yaniv Tal, CEO at Edge & Node announced plans to sunset the Hosted Service. The Graph Foundation has outlined a plan and three-phase schedule to sunset the Hosted Service, taking another massive step into the decentralized network.

Roadmap

The Hosted Service will not shut down immediately and developers will have plenty of time to learn about the network and migrate.

Phase 1: Cease new subgraph deployments to the Hosted Service

During this phase, developers will still be able to upgrade existing subgraphs on the Hosted Service but all new subgraphs will need to be deployed via Subgraph Studio to the The Graph Network.

Subgraph Studio is the sandbox environment for easy testing and development. Subgraph Studio allows deploying and testing subgraphs at no cost, and when projects are ready to move to production they can easily publish their subgraphs to the decentralized network. All billing and API key settings for a subgraph can also be managed in the Studio.

This transitional phase will prioritize support for all chains as they become available on the decentralized network, and will slow down growth of the hosted service to enable Indexers to process queries.

Phase 2: Stop all upgrades from Hosted Service accounts

In this phase, all upgrades to subgraphs must be made through Subgraph Studio and subsequently published to the decentralized network. At this point the hosted service will only support subgraphs in their current form.

To help developers migrate their subgraphs, Migration Grants are available to help bootstrap curation signal and initial query fees. If your dapp is migrating a subgraph, apply here.

To make it simple to transition, the Subgraph Studio provides a low friction user experience for automatically migrating existing subgraphs to The Graph Network. By the end of Q4, no new accounts will be created on the hosted service.

Core developers and support engineers are available to walk teams through the entire migration process, from understanding the technical steps, to KYCing for the grant, to co-marketing opportunities, as well as anything else migrants need to get comfortable with the process.

Phase 3: Fully phase out Hosted Service Subgraphs

Subgraphs will eventually no longer be supported for any chain that is integrated with the decentralized network. Engineers across core developer teams and The Graph Foundation will support the phasing out of the Hosted Service APIs to make the transition as seamless as possible.

At this stage, all queries on The Graph will be served on the decentralized network and the hosted service will not process queries. Indexers that run robust infrastructure and Graph Nodes on the network will serve queries to decentralized applications. Developers will use the Studio to pay per query, ensuring dapps are never paying for more than what they use.

Full stack decentralization means the core infrastructure of the web3 stack must be decentralized. For Dapps to truly be decentralized applications, they must run on fully decentralized infrastructure, otherwise they’re just plain apps. That means querying and indexing capabilities need to benefit from the resilience and robustness of a distributed network of indexers that operate independently beyond any centralized control structures.

The second Graph Day marks another step that has been many years in the making: full stack decentralization.

We’re excited to work with all the developers in the ecosystem to fully migrate to the Graph’s decentralized network. If you have any questions about migration, feel free to reach out to the team at any time: migration@thegraph.foundation.

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