The Graph is the most exciting project I have seen in the crypto space since the birth of Ethereum. As part of their Curator Program I was asked why I believe in the project, and I decided to put this story together explaining my reasoning. Please read on.
What is The Graph
As per one of The Graph’s early tweets, The Graph is a “decentralized query protocol for blockchains. The Graph lets you build dApps more easily on Ethereum and IPFS using GraphQL. Together we can build a new generation of the web free from monopolies.” What this means in an elevator pitch style is “all of the redundant off chain server computations to structure blockchain data completely disappears”, so developers can focus on building their products instead of provisioning infrastructure. There is plenty of information on their blog and online, so I will not go into too much details here, but in a nutshell — is The Graph critical infrastructure for Web 3.0? Yes, it is. Check.
Traction and first mover advantage
The Graph is a first mover of a new concept and these projects come once every few years, the rest will be copycats trying to replicate what The Graph is already SUCCESFULLY doing and “parasite” on the hype train. But The Graph will always have the first mover advantage. Going further, while we are used to white-paper projects delivering huge promises (which in The Graph’s case would actually be sufficient as they are a first mover), The Graph is already working and is being heavily used by leading projects like Uniswap, Synthetix, AAVE, etc. The volume of queries per month recently exceeded 10 BILLION (yes, BILLION!) with an average of about 350 million queries per day. Traction and first mover — check.
Blockchain agnostic
The Graph currently supports Ethereum, IFPS (and POA I believe), but the project is blockchain agnostic with other Layer 1s joining the party in 2021. Is this important? Yes, it is because there is no need of different indexing protocols for each single Layer 1 blockchain and everyone could use The Graph — check.
Investors
The Graph is backed by the industry leading names including Framework Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Multicoin Capital, DTC Capital and others. Actually this is how I found out about the project as I was researching Coinbase’s investments. To me this means a lot of credibility because I hope you are familiar with the “Golden rule” of VC investments and is yet another justification this project would probably be huge. Backing — check.
Team
Exceptionally strong team that have worked together on several startups and with relevant background. Again, there is sufficient information about them online, so I will not go into details here, but a) the senior leadership team know and have worked with each other well; and b) they already managed to pull this off with The Graph being a 3-year old project now launching its mainnet in few days. And last but not least — these guys kicked off and managed Indexer and Curator Programs with more than 2000 entities participating and managed to run it super smoothly. And oh boy, I can only imagine what a challenge this is in reality. Team — check.
Obviously I could write a book about The Graph and why is it important, but I hope the above are sufficient for a starter, especially for newcomers, so they can understand this is an important project and worth digging deeper into.
As always, do your own research and feel free to reach out in case you have any questions.
