Ever since the creation of the internet, we’ve been seeing new technological advances and paradigm shifts every decade or so resulting in a connected world where we spent hours on our electronic devices each single day — maybe we are already at a point of “singularity” where humans and electronic devices have become one and are inseparable, no? But there is another important aspect here — this world is also dominated by centralised mastodons monitoring and in a sense controlling our behaviour and data via complex systems and algorithms. So what next and where do we go from here?
I strongly believe the next paradigm we will see in the next decade is drifting away from above centralised “authorities” and moving onto the path to decentralisation, where no organisation has so much centralised power over our information, consumer behaviour, habits, etc. And I believe blockchain will have the leadership role here as in “a post-COVID world the principles of digital ownership, peer-to-peer networks, store of value and value sharing, etc. will be more important than ever” and will yield demand for a new wave of applications. As a confirmation, we have hints almost every significant consumer brand is already evaluating the impact of blockchains and how to interact with their customers in this new upcoming reality.
So if I am right and the next digital paradigm will be built around blockchain technology and decentralised “services”, what does this mean for The Graph and what’s next for the project? I say it means everything and that what’s next for the project is to start indexing EVERY and ALL real-world / off-chain data in a decentralised manner. Why so? Because The Graph might actually fulfil the promise of removing the backend guy and making developer’s lives easier as they can focus on building their products and applications instead of dealing with infrastructure (making development accelerated and simpler when the building blocks are there). And doing this in a decentralised and secure way.
The Graph, being critical Web 3.0 infrastructure, has the first mover advantage and is doing something no other project is doing at the moment. I have been thinking about what type of data should be indexed on The Graph, and my answer is — why not ALL of it? Why not become bigger than current reality mastodons? Why not live in a future where in 20 years every app we are using relies on The Graph without us even knowing about it?
Maybe my vision for The Graph’s future is not specific? But I don’t think we should be specific at the moment with the new digital paradigm unfolding in front of our eyes and The Graph’s huge potential yet to be unleashed after seeing 10+ billions queries per month in such a short period of time. I say let’s not be specific and see where this potential will take us. I say let’s index ALL world data on The Graph, one step at a time. Anything less would be ambition-less.
The future is decentralized. The future is The Graph.
