May 30
Subsquid: it is only the beginning of the path…
Dmitry Zhelezov, the co-founder at Subsquid.io, has gone a long way in what he is doing today. CEO of Subsquid started his path back in 2017 when there was this epic bull run and it was pretty clear that all the smart money is chasing Bitcoin and then Ethereum.
So, Dmitry decided to give it a go and started to read technical papers and especially Bitcoin white papers. Finally, as it is said — little strokes fell great oaks. He has understood how the economic model actually is working and why bitcoins are not just printed papers by some centralized entity, and why it actually does work.
Small steps and Dima`s way into the crypto space began. He wrote educational material at the technical level and got his first kind of gig. Dima says, “It was not paid, but it was pretty cool.”
It was mystery crypto that was just a very tiny startup back then. Right now it’s like a data behemoth and they’re basically Bloomberg of crypto right now.
That’s how Dima was just hustling around. One day he just bought a ticket on the plane and got to Berlin to some random conference where he met Marcel Fohrmann, co-founder of Subsquid. They started to build together; that was a fork of IOTA.
It was like a pretty, pretty ridiculous thing as we speak right now. But now nevertheless, it was like a lot of research and a lot of knowledge that we learned.
However, the bull market ended and they ended up in the bear. Pretty much similar vibes as of today. And first, it didn’t feel like everything would be going to recover: the prices went down and down and at some point, Dima and Marcel just had to switch off the lights and close the shop.
Dmitry then joined the forces of Joystream, a company building a video platform like YouTube but decentralized. Yeah. Dima was engaged with setup to build a query engine. So what is it like a query node? Query engine for it? If you think of it, once you navigate YouTube, there is a ton of data that you see on the web page comments, video titles, and video descriptions. And if you want to make this data sourced from any like blockchain-based stuff, yeah, it’s obvious that you cannot just query it and filter it accessing directly the blockchain node because blockchains are very bad as databases. They were designed for efficient propagation but never thought like as a database where you can filter and research something. So you need to have a middleware where you ingest the data from the blockchain and transform it into something that you can use on the frontend. And this is why this query middleware was built. So Joystream and Dima together started with a proof of concept and applied for a hackathon back then.
Unexpectedly, big demand from other projects that were also building apps was seen. These projects experienced similar issues, they needed to have indexed and easily accessible data for their dapps. The problem was that if they use Polkadot GTS to connect their nodes, everything was super slow. You cannot do much with your data. You are very limited to what you can actually show to your users: no historical data, no ability to aggregate, search or navigate back and forth. That’s how Dima am Marcel got their first interest.
But as an internal project for Joystream, they were constrained on resources. So negotiations started with the CEO that it might be beneficial to have it like a spin-off because everything is open source anyway. And this is how Subsquid started and the rest is history.
The most straightforward design is basically putting a big box in between the blockchain and the website. Data is transformed and put into like a database and queried against this database. And once we start building this, it became clear that this approach is super slow and it doesn’t scale. So from the very early days, of Joystream, we decided to split this process into two parts and make this data pipeline modular.
There is an Archive part that does all the indexing. So, all the blockchain data is stored in a single node. And there is a lightweight Processor part that can query the index data stored by Archive and query it in a very efficient way so that you only get the data that you actually need for your app. Instead of having millions of queries to blockchain downloading every single block, you actually have all this big batch where you get only the data that you need, and then it can do arbitrary transformation with it and store it in your local database.
With two-tier architecture, the project development starts in the Squid, the user basically connects it to the Archives and leverages this power. So it gives you a lot more speed and the process is a lot more agile because of that. From the developer's point of view, Subsquid has a different ideology — the system is open. What it means is that you can actually control everything about your API: you can add arbitrary calls to external services, for example, Coingecko, you can add arbitrary queries to your database and make it an API endpoint. So this is like a truly open platform.
About Subsquid
Subsquid is an on-chain indexing and querying solution that enables Web3 builders to gain access to on-chain data on their own terms. Featuring multilayer architecture and decentralised governance, this is the most developer-friendly and resource-efficient way to build, test, and deploy customised APIs for all blockchain-facing applications.
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