Nov 20, 2020
Roles of a Graph Curator
What is the role of a Curator?
A Curator’s role in the graph at the highest level is to signal what subgraph’s are most valuable to the network for the indexers and to drive value to the network.
These are some of a Curator’s roles broken into different tasks:
- Evangelist - Building traction to the protocol through various forms of content creation, community interactions, and outreach
- Researcher - Finding potential new protocols that may gain traction or that could use GraphQL to streamline their frontend applications
- Oracle - Understanding the current landscape of web3 to best signal indexers on what to index
- Developer - Building and maintaining the current set of subgraphs
- QA/QC Engineer - Analyzing and improving upon the current set of subgraphs
What do they do and why?
Now that you are more familiar with what a Curator’s role is, let's dive a bit deeper into each of the tasks and the motivations behind them. It is worth noting that most Curators will not be isolated to one task, but rather participate in all of them to varying degrees based on their proficiencies and inclinations.
Evangelist
The main goal of this task is to increase the adoption rate of the Graph by spreading awareness and helping drive engagement within the community. Some ways this has been done is by making memes, videos, blog posts, being active in the discord community as well as providing mentorship and training to other curators that want to learn more about the protocol.
Researcher
The main motivations behind this task are to find and bring projects into the Graph that have yet to use the protocol. By bringing in new projects, researchers are able to spur more usage within the network. This also gives them the opportunity to be the first to signal projects and capture some profits if they believe the project has value in the protocol.
Oracle
The main motivations behind this task are to provide the most accurate and profitable signals to indexers. This is done through understanding what projects have the most mindshare which in turn brings in more queries to the protocol. By signaling subgraphs that generate traffic, they are able to capture profits based on the query fees generated.
Developer
The main motivation behind this task is creating the most useful subgraphs for the community. By creating useful subgraphs they allow frontend developers and in turn, also allow end-users to access web3 data in a more cohesive and intuitive way.
QA/QC Engineer
The main motivation behind this task is to help drive more efficiency within the existing set of subgraphs. This can be done by contributing to the Github repos with fixes for potentially slow calculations, in order to make indexing a subgraph more efficient. This provides benefit to the protocol since it can help reduce resource usage for indexers.
Why should you consider becoming a curator?
If you are interested in web3 and the decentralized web in any capacity, being a curator will give you access to an entire community of like-minded developers and creators that want to see the web3 ecosystem flourish. In addition to the opportunities to better understand the ecosystem, The Graph has incentive structures in place to allow for network participants to have more rational/economic alignments as opposed to purely altruistic goals.
Resources
The Graph
Testnet
Foundry
Foundry empowers miners with the tools they need to build tomorrow’s decentralized infrastructure. We are protocol-agnostic and seek to support like-minded blockchain entrepreneurs who share our mission to advance the industry.
