The Graph Roadmap for 2023
One of the recurring questions in our Graphtronauts Telegram community is about the roadmap for the future of the The Graph network, and what the various core-dev teams are working on to improve the project.
In this article we’d like to introduce you to four areas of development that will see the light of day in 2023 and make The Graph network even stronger than it is today:
- The Sunset of the Hosted Service
- Firehose
- Substreams
- Moving the protocol to L2 with Arbitrum One
1. The Sunset of the Hosted Service
If you are familiar with The Graph ecosystem, you already know that Edge & Node (the initial team behind The Graph) is running a private, free-to-use system (referred to as the “Hosted Service”.)
What is the Hosted Service?
The Hosted Service is a free system that was originally built as a proof-of-concept to show the potential of a new indexing protocol for Ethereum. Edge & Node introduced this service during the first Graph Day in San Francisco back in January of 2019. From this initial design, the Hosted Service actually became a development environment for new blockchain integrations. It first began by supporting only Ethereum, but has since grown to support 31 blockchains like Near, Avalanche, Cosmos, and more. For the full list of supported chains, head to The Graph official website, here.
The Hosted Service has been a tremendous tool for onboarding new users to The Graph, having hosted more than 20,000 subgraphs while allowing thousands of developers across the world to experiment with The Graph protocol. However, the Hosted Service was not meant to be the final solution. Since 2018, when The Graph was announced, it’s been clear that the Hosted Service was only meant as a stepping stone to reach the ultimate goal, a fully Decentralized Network.
The Decentralized Network
On December 17th, 2020, The Graph announced the launch of its Decentralized Network. This network consists of indexer nodes providing indexing and search capabilities for the Ethereum blockchain. As of the time of writing, there are 215 indexer operators running on the Decentralized Network.
Compared to the Hosted Service, the Decentralized Service has three main characteristics:
- it’s a pay to use service, where consumers (dApps) need to pay GRT to execute searches (queries).
- it’s a permissionless network where anyone can run an indexer node without asking permission from any entity.
- it has no single point of failure as the network is decentralized and distributed across the globe.
In short, the Decentralized Network is faster, more reliable, and more efficient than the Hosted Service.
Sunsetting the Hosted Service
After almost four years of supporting subgraphs for web3 dApps, the Hosted Service will begin its sunset during Q1 2023 with dApps migrating to the Decentralized Network. However, this will only apply to chains currently supported on the network. Right now there are two chains currently supported on the Decentralized Network: Ethereum and Gnosis Chain.
This means that the free Hosted Service will continue to exist as a development system for all chains that are in the process of being fully migrated to the Decentralized Network. 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. In the future, everyone will need to use the Decentralized Network and paid service. In other words, all dApps will need to purchase GRT in order to pay indexer nodes for the work they do.
In 2023 we will see more chains become supported on the Decentralized Network. Which will be the next one? Only time will tell, but there is certainly much to look forward to in the upcoming year.
If you want to learn more about the sunsetting of the Hosted Service, you can read all the details in the official blog, specifically the latest updated announcement released on October 4th:
You can also read this thread posted on October 6th by Brandon Ramirez, who cofounded The Graph and is now leading the Research & Product group at Edge & Node:
2. Firehose: Index All Data!
Firehose is the next evolution of indexing at The Graph, and is crucial for indexing chains such as Arweave, Solana, and Near. Firehose enables exponentially faster indexing by converting blockchain data to flat files that can be stored locally, instead of relying on reading from an Erigon (or equivalent) node. This faster read time enables indexers to scale more efficiently and process more subgraphs. It also helps abstract away many of the details involved in indexing various chains by providing a consistent interface that The Graph can use. This removes some of the complexities faced by indexers today.
Firehose provides a crucial boost for the migration from the Hosted Service to the Decentralized Network, and the teams at StreamingFast and Pinax are working alongside Edge & Node to find and eliminate any remaining bottlenecks. Firehose is not the final objective, but it is a necessary step in The Graph’s journey to “index all data.”
If you want to learn more about Firehose, feel free to join the dedicated channel in The Graph Discord server, #indexer-firehose, link here.
3. Substreams: Making Indexing Faster!
Indexing blockchain data is the core functionality of The Graph Network, and for this reason it must be an extremely fast operation to execute.
One of the bottlenecks of the Decentralized Network is the speed of indexing for subgraphs, especially for dApps that need to scan a massive amount of data on blockchains (e.g. think about NFT collections). Just imagine the time it would take to fully sync (in other words to index all the available data on a blockchain like Ethereum) a subgraph. This could take weeks, even a month, to complete its job. This is where Substreams come in!
Substreams is the main project of StreamingFast, one of the six core development teams working on The Graph.
But what is Substreams?
Substreams is a new building block for high performance, parallelized stream processing. Using Substreams as an input data source, developers can expect indexing speeds up to 100x faster for their subgraphs. And that’s not a typo! This means developers can dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to index massive subgraphs (e.g. from 28 days to just 6 hours for one of the largest subgraphs). At the time of writing this article, Substreams is in Beta and is aiming to become fully available in 2023.
In a nutshell, with Substreams, instead of performing a linear indexing model, we move to a parallelized model that dramatically increases the speed of syncing and indexing. Substreams works in conjunction with Firehose, as the data it needs to manipulate comes from the Firehose.
If you want to learn more about Substreams, feel free to join the dedicated channel in the StreamingFast Discord server, #substreams, link here.
You can also watch this presentation from Alexandre Bourget, Co-Founder & CTO at StreamingFast, to discover more about Substreams:
4. Moving to Layer-2 (Arbitrum One)
Another huge milestone in 2023 will be moving the entire Graph protocol to Arbitrum, which is one of the most used L2 chains. To better understand the impact of this important milestone, let’s get into more detail.
What is a Layer 2 or L2 blockchain?
Layer 2 (L2) is a term used to describe a collection of Ethereum scaling solutions. A layer 2 is actually a separate blockchain which helps extend layer 1s, like Ethereum, while still allowing them to inherit the security guarantees of the layer 1. So what is a layer 1?
A layer 1 (L1) is a base blockchain like Ethereum or Bitcoin. We call them L1 blockchains because they are the underlying foundation of the entire web3 world. L1 chains like Ethereum and Bitcoin offer rock solid security in part due to their state of being highly decentralized. However, where these L1 chains do not perform very well is in scalability, and therefore speed of execution. For this reason we now have various layer 2 networks (or L2s) built on top of the L1 networks. Examples of layer 2 projects include “rollups” on Ethereum (Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon) and the Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin.
What is Arbitrum One?
Arbitrum One is a L2 blockchain that extends Ethereum while inheriting the security guarantees of Ethereum itself. Arbitrum (L2) dramatically reduces transaction fees and congestion by moving a large portion of computation and data storage off of Ethereum’s main network (L1). If you want to know how many dApps are currently using Arbitrum, you can check the official portal here.
Why it is important to move to L2?
The Graph announced during the last Graph Day in June 2022 that it will migrate the entire network and functionalities to Arbitrum. Ethereum’s high-fee environment has made it difficult for network participants to operate effectively and profitably. For this reason, moving to Arbitrum will create huge opportunity to grow the Graph network. This is extremely important for node operators that run the Indexer nodes, as well as heavy users of the protocol.
Take an Indexer for example. They incur high network fees every time they need to open and close allocations to subgraphs. On Ethereum you might be considered lucky to spend $3 to execute one action. Now imagine that single transaction on Arbitrum where the cost could be approximately $0.10. Using L2 technology will reduce Indexers’ costs by 100x.
Moving to Arbitrum will also be beneficial for Delegators and Curators as these important roles in the ecosystem could see lower network fees.
If you want to explore more about The Graph strategy for L2 scaling and the upcoming move to Arbitrum, you can watch the keynote that Brandon Ramirez gave at the last Graph Day on June 2022 (the video starts exactly when he speaks about moving the protocol to L2):
If you want to know more about how The Graph is planning to move to Arbitrum, you can read our latest article:
Do you have any questions?
Graphtronauts is the largest, unofficial community for long-term GRT holders who believe in The Graph’s web3 vision for the future. Our goal is to educate the broader crypto community and help them become contributing members within The Graph ecosystem.
If you have any questions, or concerns, or want to submit feedback, you can reach out to us using our social channels:
- App: graphtronauts.app
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Graphtronauts indexer is live on The Graph!
You can read our official launch announcement here.
If you want to delegate to us, you can go directly in Graph Explorer, using the link here.
You can contact us using our dedicated social channels for our Indexer operation:
- Twitter: @graphtronauts_x
- Discord: Join our Server
- Telegram: @GraphtronautsIndexer
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