Tips and Tricks to evaluate and determine if a subgraph is legitimate.
You got your GRT in your wallet and you want to get into curation and you’re excited. You see that Uniswap subgraph published and your ready to pull the trigger on signaling. It has to be legit, it says “official” right? Well, just wait you may want to inspect a few things before you signal on a subgraph.
In this guide, I want to help point out items that will help you determine if a subgraph is legitimate and if you feel comfortable signaling. With the hosted service sunsetting, there will be a bunch of subgraphs migrating over to the mainnet and I wanted to give a few pointers.
Where to go in order to curate:
The graph explorer is where you will find a list of the subgraphs on the decentralized mainnet — https://thegraph.com/explorer. You can filter newly created, newly updated, or you can also type the name of a specific subgraph to get one as well.
- You can filter view as shown below to help you.
When you open a subgraph you can inspect a few things right off the bat
A) Description
B) Website
C) Github
D) Entities
If there is one of these missing or questionable does it mean it’s not legitimate? Not exactly. Just need to gather all the information and make an informed decision. For example, Premia, has no Github but is a legitimate subgraph that was vetted out.
Does it say test or any indication of this? If so then red flag. Some are deployed and more obvious they are a test since its in the subgraph name. Others may mention it in the description. So it is a good habit to read over the description of the subgraph. Some may give much more detail than others in general about the subgraph.
Does it list website? Does the website actually work? It is good practice to list a website and definitely a red flag if one is not put there.
Is there a GitHub link to research the deployer? They should provide this or a red flag. You can check to see the publishers depth of work on their Github. If the subgraph is the only item or not much work then may need to ask more questions. Is there multiple subgraphs with same project name deployed by different devs? If so more due diligence is required.
How many entities does it have? More than likely 1 or 2 entities is a red flag. This is not always the case such as a smaller subgraph like Eth Burned which only has 1 entity. But it is something to look out for.
Another red flag is to see an example entity. This is the auto populated field when a subgraph is first generated on the developers computer. If this is the only thing that exists, it’s pretty major red flag since the developer did not update the subgraphs schema See example below:
You can also open up the deployer wallet and inspect the transactions
This will bring you to this page below. Here you can see if the same person deployed one or many subgraphs and which ones. If they are signaling on them and how much GRT they have in the protocol.
If you really want to dig in, you can click on address and it will send you to etherscan and you can inspect some of the activity they have within etherscan. This can let you know how long the wallet was in use. If they just opened the wallet to deploy the subgraph and what other crypto the wallet may hold.
One good place to visit is the billing dashboard
The billing dashboard created by Michael Lesane — http://michael.lesane.net/graphdash/billing#/. This is made by using the billing subgrah data from the hosted server. It attempts to associated each billing address to every project. If a project has funded their billing address, that is a good sign the subgraph will get usage.
You can click on the little eye next to the wallet address to get a better visualization of when the project is billed. Typically its every 7th day as you can see on the dates or once a week. The blue indicates volume billed on that date.
Things to watch out for :
Does the subgraph have unsupported features that prevents indexers from indexing? This could be a variety of items that may cause this warning. Maybe it is using the wrong spec version, or experimental features not yet included on the mainnet. This is something that can be fixed by the dev but may take time to sort out and will play into your decision process as a curator.
Does the subgraph show failed? There could be issues with the subgraph that need to be worked out and can take time. This will be prevent indexing and will be no query fees produced.
Does deployer have some self signal? They all don’t have to have this but it is a good sign they have skin in the game and depending on your train of thought can play into your decision making if a project invests in themself.
Places to check
- Twitter — you can check a protocols twitter to see how many followers they have. For an established project, you would expect a high amount of followers. For example an established Hop Protocol has 84k followers. A much smaller project MMO Finance has just over 500 twitter followers.
- Traffic search websites such as https://www.similarweb.com/ that track traffic to each website and give statistics. This can be utilized when trying to guesstimate query fee usage. Using the same examples above as comparison
Hop Protocol
MMO Finance
- Discord — You can certainly jump into a protocols discord channel and ask directly about the deployed subgraph. I would search first within the protocols discord for key words like “subgraph”, “graph”, and “GRT” to prevent duplicate questions if someone has already posted questions about the subgraph.
- OKGraph — OKGraph — https://okgraph.xyz/ — you can also plug in the deployment ID found under the GitHub address on graph explorer here to see subgraph status. Before a subgraph is published to the mainnet it is first deployed to the studio. This page allows us to see if the studio indexer was able to sync the subgraph, and it gives us an idea of how large it is. If the studio indexer failed to sync the subgraph — mainnet indexers are likely to fail as well. If the subgraph has very few entities this may be a red flag. If the subgraph hasn’t completed syncing in the studio this can also be a red flag since the developer may have published before testing the subgraph — this can lead to bugs or flawed logic and necessitate an upgrade before it’s used in a production environment.
- DappLooker — graphlooker.com There is a directions how to use here. For further questions you can join discord
- Graph Network Billing Dashboard — here
- User Billing Balance Dashboard — here
- Subgraph entities testing
- Visualization of subgraph data
- Sanity check if subgraph data is updated
-Download to CSV for further analysis
I hope this helps you when trying to evaluate your choice of subgraph. Lastly, I will provide places to go to interact with other curators
Places to join and interact:
- Graph Discord https://discord.gg/ZQPWvTB3 which has a channel dedicated to curation
- Curation Station telegraph -https://t.me/CurationStation which has just under 400 members who discuss current topics and trends of curation. We also help determine valid subgraphs. There are also indexer, graph members, and projects themselves have even popped in to explain how they will use their subgraphs.
The great thing about this telegram channel is the bot that indicates when a subgraph is published or a subgraph has an increase or decrease in signal as well as version changes. If you want just bot notifications you can join this channel https://t.me/GRT_Curation
3. Curation Station Discord — https://discord.gg/mD8zva6b. Most activity can be found in telegram above as of this article date, but Discord maybe utilized more as curation takes off after the sunset of the hosted service.
