The Graph gains a new core developer Figment, with technical expertise across 35+ proof-of-stake networks including Solana, Polygon, Polkadot, NEAR, Celo, and more.
The Graph is already one of the most utilized protocols In Web3. Figment — one of the largest staking and node infrastructure providers — will join The Graph ecosystem and fuel the growth of public goods in the Web3 economy.
Today we are excited to announce that The Graph Foundation and The Graph Council have provided the blockchain development team at Figment — one of the world’s largest blockchain infrastructure and services providers serving customers worldwide — a core development grant of 80M GRT to be distributed over 5 years. Figment is joining The Graph ecosystem as a core protocol developer to grow the decentralized indexing layer for Web3.
This news is a major milestone in the shift to Web3 and decentralization. It marks one of the largest mergers of a centralized company into a decentralized protocol, as part of a larger mission to make open data a public good. This news follows many other initiatives pointing to the expansion of critical infrastructure for Web3 in the past few weeks alone, including StreamingFast joining The Graph ecosystem and the announcement of over $2.8M of GRT awarded in grants from The Graph Foundation to support the community’s ongoing work to build the decentralized web.
These are the shifts that will push Web3 further and faster, challenging and changing the world’s biggest companies and their business models — building a future of stronger equality, privacy, and participation in web services.
”We’re thrilled to have Figment join The Graph as a core dev and grow the developer horsepower,” said Eva Beylin, Director of The Graph Foundation. “The Figment team’s experience with node infrastructure and multi-blockchain is unparalleled and their expertise will be invaluable to the community’s work in building out the protocol and The Graph ecosystem.” Figment will join Edge & Node and StreamingFast as core developers on The Graph.
How Figment Fits Into What The Graph Is Building
The Graph ecosystem is driven by a future where individuals are active builders and owners of the services and protocols they use and love. The Graph Council believes this future will only be possible if strong teams across The Graph, and Web3 in general, can work together to develop critical infrastructure. Protocols allow many individuals and organizations to unite under a shared mission and develop decentralized infrastructure owned by communities, not corporations.
The Figment team is experienced with contributing to protocols, improving node infrastructure and indexing on The Graph. Joining The Graph community allows Figment to contribute to a decentralized and community-owned infrastructure for Web3, powering the future of the Internet. In this role, Figment will contribute to improving indexing performance, adding support for native network subgraphs, expanding multiblockchain support, and contributing to the evolution of the core protocol. Figment’s native DataHub service will also migrate to The Graph for its indexing infrastructure.
“We are excited to establish a stronger presence on The Graph by becoming one of the three core development teams. The Graph is the most robust decentralized indexing protocol in the world, and we look forward to bringing this core infrastructure to more blockchain ecosystems.”
- Andrew Cronk, Co-Founder, Chief Product Officer at Figment
Figment is a leading provider of staking, middleware, and application layer solutions for token holders and developers investing in and building on Web3 technologies. Their validator infrastructure, data indexers, and developer tooling spans across 35+ proof-of-take networks, including The Graph. Their technology is already used by thousands of token holders and developers across the globe, with over $6B in assets staked to their infrastructure.
Figment began its journey in 2018 and its founding team has over 25+ years of experience building and scaling Internet infrastructure. This experience combined with a passion for open, borderless, and public systems makes Figment a perfect technical and mission driven team for The Graph ecosystem. Their technical expertise across a wide range of protocols will significantly streamline The Graph deployments on Solana, Polygon, Polkadot, NEAR, Celo, and more.
For years, decentralized applications ran on centralized nodes and servers, but now Web3-native infrastructure and data availability are paving the way for a new Internet marketplace of apps and services that are inherently decentralized and more financially inclusive. We are already beginning to see a blurring of the lines between Web2 and Web3 and both The Graph and Figment recognize Web3 is where the future lies.
The grant furthers Figment’s larger objective of developing infrastructure and protocols that support the ongoing evolution of decentralized public goods that are not owned by any one individual, corporation or entity. It also compliments Figment’s objective of building a better Internet by increasing usage of the next-generation of proof-of-stake blockchains.
Web3 is inevitable and as more projects join The Graph, the faster we’ll get there. If you look closely, the future is already unveiling itself in Web3. An era of strong equality, privacy, and participation is upon us.
About The Graph
The Graph is the indexing and query layer of the decentralized web (Web3). Developers build and publish open APIs, called subgraphs, that applications can query using GraphQL. The Graph currently supports indexing data from 22 different networks including Ethereum, Arbitrium, Avalanche, Celo, Fantom, Moonbeam, IPFS, and PoAa with more networks coming soon. To date, over 18,000 subgraphs have been deployed on the hosted service and now subgraphs can be deployed directly on the network! ~20,000 developers have built subgraphs for applications, such as Uniswap, Synthetix, Aragon, Gnosis, Balancer, Livepeer, DAOstack, AAVE, Decentraland, and many others.
If you are a developer building an application or Web3 application, you can use subgraphs for indexing and querying data from blockchains. The Graph allows applications to efficiently and performantly present data in a UI and allows other developers to use your subgraph too! You can deploy a subgraph or query existing subgraphs that are in the Graph Explorer. The Graph would love to welcome you to be Indexers, Curators and/or Delegators on The Graph’s mainnet. Join The Graph community by introducing yourself in The Graph Discord for technical discussions, join The Graph’s Telegram chat, or follow The Graph on Twitter! The Graph’s developers and members of the community are always eager to chat with you, and The Graph ecosystem has a growing community of developers who support each other.
The Graph Foundation oversees The Graph Network. The Graph Foundation is overseen by the Technical Council. Edge & Node, StreamingFast and now Figment are three of the many organizations within The Graph ecosystem.
