The Future of The Graph: The Road to Web 3
Original source: Blockchain Robin
The Graph launched its mainnet a few days ago. This is a huge achievement for a project that has been working behind the scenes for over three years.
Now that The Graph is live, I want to take a step back and see how The Graph protocol and subgraphs will evolve in the future.
Talking about The The future of Graph cannot fail to look at the impact of the Web 3 revolution.
Web 3 at this point is not about technology, or performance. If you compare today's Web 3 apps to Web 2, they are slower and more complex to use than existing Web 2 apps.
Web 3 is about identity and control. Who we are as users and the data behind it and how we decide to use it. It's about power and who has control over the technologies, apps and content we use every day. Google now controls more than 70% of web search traffic, and Facebook controls (and owns) the online identities of billions of people. Web 3 completely denies this from happening.
The Graph and Web 3
The Graph is a query Indexing protocol for networks like Ethereum and IPFS. Developers can build open APIs called subgraphs to access specific data in the blockchain in a more convenient way. Graph uses GraphQL to query data in the blockchain. So, anyone can use it.
The Graph The Basics© The Graph
Web 3 builds its promise around 5 key elements.
Identity control. Own your own identity, data and reputation
Interoperability: seamless integration between different dApps built on different chains .
Reliability. Public infrastructure in operation with close to 100% availability.
Trust. Built on smart contracts and digital agreements
Security. Security and Privacy
The Graph today builds the first step by querying and indexing blockchain data to actually Delivering on the promise of Web 3. It needs to further develop its capabilities by adding layers of reliability and security to the blockchain’s indexed data.
What the Web 3 protocol stack looks like today, The Graph is part of the protocol layer that helps index and query valuable data from the blockchain.
The purpose of this blog post is not to introduce the Web 3 protocol stack in detail, but to see the future development of The Graph from it.
Web 3 Protocol stack (© Coinbase blog), including The Graph
In the modern world, everything we do relies on data and access to reliable data. In a Web 2 world, if you have a data quality problem, you can find a workaround because you're in a centralized organization. In a blockchain/Web 3 environment, this is even more important as data usage continues to increase, because if your data is wrong, the smart contract execution will be wrong too. You need to have reliable data in smart contracts to build digital agreements. Current blockchain technologies supported by smart contracts show limited support for data quality assessment of transaction payloads. This is crucial because the purpose of blockchain is to remove middlemen, however, middlemen often play an important role in assuring a certain level of quality of the data used by the system. Furthermore, due to the typical immutability of blockchains, data of poor quality is bound to be stored in blockchains forever.
Data usage: are you ready?
Graph is a data indexing protocol, which may develop into a data indexing and quality control protocol in the future.
In the world of Web 2, data quality is done through big data third parties, such as master data management (MDM), which stores what we call The "golden record" of the system and share it with everyone in the system who needs it. The 'golden record' is generally established with the help of external and internal references. This is of course not a suitable pattern for Web3 as MDM is a purely centralized tool, but this should give us some ideas/hints where we can go from here and build data quality protocols in a decentralized manner.
The Graph can develop in another dimension in the future, which is to support the diversification of networks and blockchains. Of course, Ethereum is the king today, and the first step in building The Graph with ETH is completely reasonable. Still, I don't believe in "winner takes all", tomorrow, we will have a multi-chain ecosystem of different dominant layer-1 blockchains.
DeFI is one example of a successful decentralized application on Ethereum, but there are many more. A bridge has already been deployed between DeFi and privacy blockchain capabilities such as Oasis. More dApps are even built on Oasis, such as Insure.Network in the insurance field.
In terms of data usage, the next big wave may come from digital art and non-fungible tokens (NFT) and games (in fact, games may be in Bring billions of users on the blockchain, it may be bigger than DeFi). In this area, the Flow blockchain, as a layer-1 protocol, provides a solid foundation for handling such activities on the blockchain. The team behind Flow are the creators of CryptoKitties, which became famous back in 2017 for being the first dApp to cause congestion on the Ethereum network. Ubisoft, one of the leaders in the global gaming industry, is currently running a node on the Flow blockchain. This might tell you that the gaming industry is moving faster than you think.
Integrate The Short/medium-term development of the first layer of Graph
We can even think about different scenarios in the long term, one of which may be like we can hear some today As people say: "The Graph is the Google of blockchain". At this stage, this is not true. There's a lot (and I mean a lot...) that needs to be done in order for this to happen. Why do you want to do this? Because Google today is a reference for the masses (companies and people). The image below shows the phased short/medium and long-term views.
to large Scale adoption The Graph's short/medium and long term view
So, we are far from this vision and the competition could surge at any time.
Conclusion
The future of The Graph is bright, even if we just Start your Web3 journey. The use of blockchain data is just beginning. Data quality and control will be a key topic in the next few years, and many things still need to be defined. As a central part of manipulating blockchain data, The Graph already has all the keys to make a difference.
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