Announcing Mission Control: The Graph’s Incentivized Testnet

You are invited to compete in Mission Control, The Graph’s incentivized testnet!

Today we’re launching Mission Control, The Graph’s incentivized testnet. Mission Control is a competition where Indexers can operate nodes, complete missions and contribute to improving The Graph Network ahead of mainnet launch. Over 15 node operators, including Staking Facilities, Certus One, Staked, Chorus One and Bloq, have already entered the mission control center by pre-registering for the testnet.

The Graph has been running a hosted service in production since January 2019, processing queries for dApps on Ethereum and IPFS like Synthetix, Uniswap, Aave, Gnosis, Aragon and more. With over 1,700 Subgraphs deployed, The Graph has become a core primitive for decentralized application development.

The team behind The Graph has spent the past two and a half years working with blockchain developers, improving subgraph features, hardening Graph Node, scaling the hosted service, and designing and building the next big step for the protocol — the decentralized network. Now the network is ready to be battle-tested with real query volume and decentralized by inviting community Indexers into The Graph’s mission control room.

Wolfgang Albrecht, Co-Founder of Staking Facilities, says

“There are heaps of crypto projects competing to do the same thing, and then there are those that are on the frontier, building novel protocols and occupying whitespace. The Graph Network is part of the latter, and we are thrilled to support the team in their mission of growing the decentralization movement through Web3.”

If you are interested in running a node and competing as an Indexer, register here. Take one small step for hacker, one giant leap for hackerkind and join us as we prepare for liftoff.

Mission Control

The Graph’s hosted service is processing over 1 billion monthly queries against subgraphs, open APIs that anyone can query with GraphQL. Once The Graph Network launches, anyone will be able to run a node to provide indexing services to the network and become a curator to ensure that data is accurate and organized.

• Indexers operate Graph Nodes and stake GRT to index blockchain data; ensuring uptime, reducing security risk of centralized databases and enabling applications to be fully serverless. Indexers earn query fees and indexing GRT token rewards for their services.
• Curators signal on subgraphs and stake GRT to indicate to Indexers which subgraphs are high-quality and should be indexed. Curators also earn a portion of query fees for the subgraphs they signal on, incentivizing them to curate the highest quality data sources.

Mission Control invites node operators interested in being Indexers to help validate economic design, test security, network capacity, Indexer and Curator performance in the protocol.

The testnet will run five phases and each phase will have specific objectives and missions that Indexers will compete in to accumulate a score. The Mission Control Leaderboard will rank performance of Indexers based on their overall scores, which will be derived from a combination of technical performance like query performance, testnet profit maximization, and qualitative contributions like metrics sharing, collaboration and feedback.

Node operators are expected to follow the rules that will be outlined when testnet launches. Indexers who compete in missions, perform well, contribute to testnet learnings and follow the rules will be eligible to earn testnet GRT testnet rewards. Visit the testnet website to learn more details about Mission Control and incentives for participating.

Participation Requirements

If you’re interested in participating in the testnet, please fill out the registration form. Once this is complete, The Graph team will be in touch to ask about further details about each phase and for required documentation to participate.

Testnet participants will also collaborate with The Graph team to learn as much as possible about the testnet. We expect validator teams to communicate with us throughout the testnet, including but not limited to:

• Joining The Graph Discord channel: https://thegraph.com/discord
• Sharing logs, DevOps metrics and other testnet data
• Providing qualitative and quantitative feedback about the protocol, products (eg. subgraphs, explorer dApp) and Graph ecosystem
• Email updates from The Graph team
• Workshops and AMAs by The Graph engineering team

All node operators will also be required to sign an Indexer Agreement to participate in the testnet and be eligible for rewards.

Technical Requirements

An Indexer will need to run server and database infrastructure to run a Graph Node locally and participate in the incentivized testnet. Node operators should be prepared (but are not required) to support ~5M queries per day throughout the testnet.

Prerequisites for participating in the testnet include:

• Server infrastructure for running Rust binaries on Linux
• Basic: use cloud service provider (eg. Google Cloud, AWS)
• Full: set up server hardware and/or data center
• Ethereum node (deployed by operator or by node service provider)
• IPFS node
• PostgreSQL
• Kubernetes or preferred container orchestration framework

Be prepared for penetration and vulnerability testing for cloud service providers and data centers.

• Check with your cloud service provider to see if they require submission and approval for vulnerability and penetration testing. Example of AWS submission.
• Check with your data-center provider if they require a vulnerability and penetration testing disclosure.

We are excited to work with the best node operators in the Web3 space to test The Graph Network and help our network participants learn about contributing to The Graph’s ecosystem. Please reach out to The Graph team if you have any further questions about the testnet.

Please note that the program is only open to (i) U.S. persons who are “accredited investors” or (ii) non-U.S. persons. Any U.S. person who is an accredited investor will have to comply with the requisite verification process.

THE COMPETITION IS NOT AND WILL NOT BE OFFERED OR SOLD, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, TO ANY PERSON WHO IS A RESIDENT, ORGANIZED, OR LOCATED IN ANY COUNTRY OR TERRITORY SUBJECT TO OFAC COMPREHENSIVE SANCTIONS PROGRAMS FROM TIME TO TIME, INCLUDING CUBA, CRIMEA REGION OF UKRAINE, DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF KOREA, IRAN, SYRIA, ANY PERSON FOUND ON THE OFAC SPECIALLY DESIGNATED NATIONALS, BLOCKED PERSONS LIST, ANY OTHER CONSOLIDATED PROHIBITED PERSONS LIST AS DETERMINED BY ANY APPLICABLE GOVERNMENTAL AUTHORITY, OR ANY PERSONS WHO ARE ORGANIZED, LOCATED, OR RESIDENTS OF NEW YORK STATE.

About The Graph

The Graph is an indexing protocol for organizing and efficiently accessing data from blockchains and storage networks.

The Graph currently supports indexing data from Ethereum, POA, and IPFS, with more networks coming soon. To date, over 1,700 subgraphs have been deployed for applications like Uniswap, Synthetix, Aragon, Gnosis, Balancer, Livepeer, DAOstack, AAVE, and Decentraland.

Join our community by introducing yourself in our Discord for technical discussions, join our Telegram chat, or follow us on Twitter! Our developers are always eager to chat with you, and The Graph ecosystem has a growing community of developers working to build the decentralized future.

Testnet website: https://thegraph.com/testnet

Blog: https://thegraph.com/blog/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thegraph/

Everest: https://everest.link