Can the blockchain index protocol The Graph realize the Web3 vision?

Many people in the industry believe that Web3 will be a platform that can achieve large-scale decentralization, and some blockchain protocol sets will promote a new wave of decentralized experiences to flourish and replace Existing software components and deployment methods around the world.

The Graph is the indexing and querying layer for the Web3 decentralized web. Developers or anyone on the network can build and publish open data APIs called Subgraphs (subgraphs), which applications can query using GraphQL. Currently supports data indexing on Ethereum and IPFS, and will support more blockchain infrastructure in the near future. Many project parties including Curve, Zapper, Uniswap, Decentraland, PoolTogether have established their own Subgraph.

Recently, Iris, head of Asian business strategy at The Graph, conducted a wonderful AMA with users on the chain node , to answer questions from community users: What are the current application scenarios of the blockchain index? How to break the data market monopolized by giants? What is the vision of Web3 in everyone's mind?

Q1: End-user groups for blockchain indexing Are they all developers? Under what circumstances will the blockchain index be used? What innovations does The Graph bring? What is the Graph token economic model?

Iris: Consumers are the end users of The Graph, who can query subgraphs and submit queries to indexers, curators and the client pays the query fee. Currently consumers in The Graph network are mostly developers or projects paying for queries on their own applications. I think wherever there is an application, there is a need for data indexing.

The Graph lacked a fully centralized data indexing solution before, and many teams used a centralized index server to To overcome the problem, these servers retrieve data from Ethereum and store it in the database.

The Graph solves several problems in the chain world:

-dApps need solutions for ingesting and transforming data from underlying data sources. Blockchain data is difficult to store in a format that can be directly retrieved and used in applications.

-Difficult to get data directly from ethernet nodes to support web or mobile applications

-Web3 stack lacks index and query layers

-Through The Graph, data queries are processed on a decentralized network, thus ensuring the openness of data and the sustainable operation of dApps. dApps using The Graph will be "centralized services", which means they will not rely on a single centralized server to reduce the possibility of downtime, users do not have to trust a certain team to operate the server, developers can use the agreement Deploy to a trusted public infrastructure that requires no extra effort of your own to manage.

GRT is ERC20, used to capture and allocate resources in the network. When the main network is launched, the total amount is 10 billion, and an annual increase rate of 3% is used as an index reward, and is subject to independent technical governance. Active indexers, curators, and delegators can earn income from the network proportional to their workload and GRT staked. Each ecological role has a clear reward and punishment mechanism. Indexers earn query fees and indexer rewards. Curators send signals in specific subgraphs and share a part of the subgraph’s query revenue, and encourage the highest quality data sources. Delegators contribute by staking GRT to existing indexers/nodes, and receive a portion of query fees and indexing rewards from them. Users/consumers pay query fees to nodes, curators and delegators.

Q2: When I authenticated this project with my real name last time, I was sentenced to fail the authentication on the last day, and I missed the investment opportunity. It's a pity that Uniswap's website was down at that time. Can you use your technology to solve the problem of inaccessible downtime like centralized websites?

Recently, I have seen some introductions about the global root domain name server and China’s layout and efforts in this regard, so can the development of graph and web3. Will the server situation be addressed in the future? Or is this just an idea?

Iris: The downtime depends on what caused it. There was a Uniswap crash before that should be due to congestion on the Ethereum chain Caused. Centralized service providers have enormous unilateral power to set rules, grant or revoke access or control data. Often, users have no voice or awareness, and information is asymmetric. In addition, in a decentralized blockchain network, it is difficult to store data in a format that can be directly used in applications, which makes it difficult and time-consuming to retrieve data, which greatly affects the user experience. In the past, many teams used centralized index servers to overcome the problem, and these servers retrieved data from Ethereum and stored it in the database. With the API exposed, this approach feels like it has changed back to Web2. Users need to trust these teams to continue to run the server correctly. Modifying data for some reason, being acquired or simply making mistakes can lead to the termination of the project. The Graph frees developers and users from having to worry about such issues.

The Graph and Web3 provide a solution to the power imbalance caused by centralized monopoly, which is not only Western, Rather, it is a problem with all existing centralization. The Graph is the index and query layer of the Web3 decentralized network, providing core middleware and infrastructure for Web3. With mainnet live, our vision of a web3 global decentralized index and api layer has become a reality. The digital currency economy brings fundamentally innovative prospects for future construction and socio-economic models. Web3's open smart protocols create transparency and opportunity for anyone to contribute their talents to the global economy.

We support the realization of this vision and help developers build new collaboration mechanisms in the blockchain era.

1. Enabling fully decentralized applications by creating tools that improve the developer experience of indexing and querying blockchain data.

2. Build a global open API network not controlled by monopolies and maintained by various actual players/stakeholders. We believe decentralization will revolutionize the way humans collaborate and organize, and web3-enabled tools like The Graph will help more people find their place in the world and make their greatest contribution.

Q3: 1. This project seems to have the possibility of being attacked by DDOS. An attacker can send a large number of requests to the indexer, then pretend that the data has not been received, and forfeit the due money, thereby bringing the system to a state of paralysis.

2. How to ensure the reliability of the arbitrator? If arbitrators are bribed to make a wrong arbitration, what mechanism is in place to sanction them?

3. Subgraphs and curation seem to have the possibility of being copied. If indexers collectively collude to copy subgraphs and curators, replace their shares with their own, and then offer lower fees to users, will subgraph creators and curators be disincentivized? How to protect the "intellectual property rights" of the creators and curators of the sub-pictures, while avoiding the price increase?

4. If the project is applied to applications with high economic value such as DeFi, will there be such a situation: when the profit of the malicious attack of the indexer exceeds the loss of the penalty, the index device will launch a malicious attack? Does this prevent the project from being used in high economic value applications?

5. The mechanism of the curator seems to have the risk of price manipulation. Malicious attackers can deliberately create a large number of transactions to make the curator's income look high, attract leeks to enter the market, and then sell their own shares to complete the harvest. How to prevent such price manipulation?

Iris: When designing the economic model, our team thought deeply about incentives and rewards and punishments that encourage participation in the network and prevent do evil. The main purpose of the testnet is to test the stability of the network in the process and adjust economic factors to maintain the operation of the network. Over the past 6 months, indexers have worked together to improve the network, ensuring stability and high query throughput. The network in the testnet can support 1,000-2,000 queries per second with 99% uptime. Post-mainnet indexers will continue to strive to support up to 5,000 queries per second, the current query rate in the graph dapp ecosystem. As the network grows, so will the number of gateways hosted by third parties to serve global indexers. The first case is less likely to bring the network to a standstill.

The dispute was brought by the challenger, the arbitrators announced in Discord that they are investigating the dispute, the defendant, the challenger Both the arbitrator and the arbitrator will publish their own information and then investigate to see if they match each other. Arbiters can also be slashed for misjudgment.

The presence of a bogus or low-quality indexer for a particular subgraph slows down the lookup of good providers. So we want to discover those indexers that are of interest. In order for the above mechanism to work properly, it is important to incentivize indexers to hold GRT roughly equal to their contribution to the network. Curators stake GRT into a bonding curve, signal on specific subgraphs, and earn a portion of query fees in the subgraphs they signal; incentivize the highest quality data sources. Since the income conforms to the law of the bonding curve, the earlier the curation signal is on the sub-graph, based on a certain amount of GRT pledged, the greater the proportion of query fees that the curator can obtain in a certain sub-graph. In the initial version of the network, one mitigation for this attack was a "subgraph availability oracle", which was able to refuse to list subgraphs so that indexer rewards could not be obtained. Also fisherman protects the network by checking that query responses are correct. Therefore, The Graph will first provide fisherman services for the network.

We are not oracle, data indexing is the result rather than the cause, it is something that has already happened. This is not the same as the attack on the oracle machine.

It is almost impossible for an indexer to profit from an attack more than the loss from being slashed. For example, the index results will affect http://uniswap.info, but will not affect The entire http://app.uniswap.org.

In addition, there is another mechanism to protect the network at present, which is a 28-day unfreezing period, including indexers, curators, and principals All withdrawals have a 28-day unfreezing period, so various attacks are well prevented.

Q4: Can the indexer rely on its own "reputation" to bypass the system and privately Transactions, thus avoiding "paying taxes"?

Iris: I don’t know if I understand your question correctly. What kind of tax do you mean? I don't think indexers nor users have enough incentive to do this. Considering that 3% annual issuance incentives are given to indexers. And as users, developers can focus on the core functions of decentralized applications by using The Graph. They will be able to deploy protocols to trusted public infrastructure that they don't need to manage and benefit from economies of scale. The advantage of TheGraph is the entire decentralized network effect, which provides great incentives and benefits to all ecological participants.

Q5: Does the SEC's lawsuit against Ripple have any impact on your project? How to avoid similar incidents from happening to yourself?

Iris: The compliance risk in the United States is mainly whether the SEC considers the currency to be a security, and whether the token is a security depends on Tested on Howey. The main criterion for a digital currency not to be a security is that it is not purely speculative. Such investments will not constitute securities if the investor's own actions will determine whether profits will accrue. In addition to the payment function, Grt is mainly used to motivate everyone to participate in the network. The SEC also released information to better determine when a digital asset is not a security token. If a digital asset meets one or more of these conditions, it has a higher chance of failing the Howey test.

The standards mentioned by the SEC include:

Distributed ledger Whether the network is sufficiently developed and operational.

If the token meets user needs rather than speculative value.

If the token can be used immediately for its intended function.

Whether the value increase of the token is limited.

If the value of the token rises it is accidental and secondary to its functionality.

If the token is indispensable for the platform or the secondary market.

The token can be used for purchases or as a substitute for currency.

GRT meets many standards, and we have always paid attention to compliance issues.

Q6: The Graph is called Blockchain Google, so what stage is The Graph at now? When can we see The Graph's explosive growth?

Iris: The Graph mainnet has just launched, and it is still in the transition stage from the testnet to full centralization. So far, more than 3,400 subgraphs have been deployed on The Graph, including the official teams of some well-known projects like Uniswap, Synthetix, Aragon, AAVE, Gnosis, Balancer, Livepeer, DAOstack, AAVE, Decentraland, etc. The monthly query volume has exceeded 10 billion. From 1 billion in June to 10 billion in November, it is already an explosive growth. The demand for data is born from the activity of decentralized applications. As the core middleware of Web3, Defi and other application growth and TheGraph's development are complementary.

Q7: At present, The Graph's partners are mainly projects in the Defi field, so which fields will we cooperate with in the future?

Iris: DeFi, NFT, art, game market, any application is inseparable from data, as long as there is an active ecosystem of developers, We will support.

Q8: What are the usage scenarios of GRT? Will there be some mechanism to support the true value of the token?

Iris: GRT is used to capture and allocate resources in the network. Consumers, as end users, can use GRT to pay query fees, indexers run nodes to pledge GRT to earn query fees and node rewards, curators pledge GRT to indicate which subgraphs are worth indexing, and delegators pledge coins to nodes to earn income . I think the real value of the token is mainly based on the actual application. The Graph is outstanding in terms of application scenarios, magnitude, and actual token application requirements.

Q9: What is the core value of the Web3 protocol stack? What are the benefits for people to run the graph nodes?

Iris: We believe that going to Web3 will completely change the way humans cooperate and organize, and empowerment like The Graph The tools of web3 will help more people find their place in the world and make their best contribution. Running The Graph node can earn a part of the query fee and network rewards, and get the bonus of the rapid development of The Graph network.

Q10: How is your indexing service more advanced than giants like Google?

Iris: Centralized service providers have great unilateral power to set rules, grant or revoke access or control data. Usually, users have no voice or awareness, information is asymmetric, and the distribution of benefits is very unbalanced. The value of decentralized applications comes from the fact that you don't have to trust a specific company to use, extend and combine functionality, distributing incentives to various actual participants/stakeholders.

The Graph will ensure that data is open and decentralized applications continue to operate no matter what the situation. Traditional data indexing services and cloud service providers are centralized solutions. They operate their own private servers, which brings security and risks of stopping operations, and also incurs rental fees, increasing the cost of applications. The Graph Network is the first decentralized public and open data API and supports building serverless applications.

Q11: Web2 usually completes quality management through big data third parties, the graph network has conducted Web3 queries and APIs In addition to decentralization, how do you complete data quality control?

Iris: The Curator role signals to indexers which APIs the Graph network should index. Curators deposit GRT on a binding curve to signal on specific subgraphs and earn a portion of query fees for the subgraphs they signal; incentivizing the highest quality data sources. Curators will curate subgraphs and stake GRT through the Graph Explorer dApp. Because this happens on the bonding curve, there is a tax rebate on curators for removing bad decisions that could compromise the integrity of the network. If curators choose to curate on lower-quality subgraphs, they also earn less query fees because there are fewer queries to process, or fewer indexers to process them.

Q12: Can you tell us about the ecology of TheGraph and how it works? In addition to developers, how can other enthusiasts participate, what contributions can they make, and what rewards can they reap? What is the token economic model?

Iris: Simply put, developers build and publish open data APIs called subgraphs. These subgraphs define how data is extracted, processed, indexed and served in a verifiable manner. Applications can query these APIs using GraphQL, a flexible query language from Facebook. Non-developers can act as principals to pledge coins to nodes to obtain income, and can also act as curators. For the token economic model, you can pay attention to the relevant information published in Chinese on our official account TheGraph.

Q13: What do you think is the next stage of Web3? What does it mean for DeFi? What are the current bottlenecks? What kind of solutions can the graph provide?

Iris: You can see that the infrastructure of Web3 is starting to mature, which provides the conditions for building good and usable applications on Web3.

Development is still in its early stages and the stack is not fully completed. But the pieces are coming together, and we should be ready for widespread adoption soon. I think the bottleneck is to provide a user experience that is comparable to or even better than the current centralized application.

The graph is also an organizational force, and data needs to be organized in order to be used efficiently. There were http servers before modern browsers, but search engines made building websites a useful activity for the larger whole, contributing to the internet as a whole. The same is true of The Graph for Web3. Prior to this, there was a lack of a decentralized way to index and query blockchain data. The lack of tools and mature protocols makes it difficult to build truly decentralized applications. We provide developers with very necessary and core tools, which are an important foundation for the vigorous development and use of Web3 applications.

Q14: When there is a dispute over the index, the arbitrator shall What determines whether to slash an indexer? How is arbitration fairness determined? Who will own the confiscated tokens?

Iris: The arbitrators announced in Discord that they are investigating the dispute.

The indexer monitors a particular Discord channel for any disputes. and respond within a certain period of time.

A three-party comparison will be made based on the results of the party that raised the dispute, the results of the indexer and the results of the arbitrator.

And Fisherman (who monitors whether the query feedback is correct) will be rewarded with 50% of the Slashing cost caused by misdeeds.

Q15: At present, Ethereum 2.0 has attracted much attention. How do you understand the future development of ETH2.0? Do you have any plans for the graph in the future?

Iris: Ethereum 2.0 is far from the application stage, and it has no real significance in the short term, and it is still too early to really arrive. As long as there is an active ecosystem of developers, TheGraph will support it.

Q16: How to ensure that the funds are used for the project and assign value to the token, will it be like EOS, buy BTC or just do nothing, split?

Iris: This is mostly a Governance issue. The Graph's council is a 6/10 multisig represented by five role teams: Indexers, Users, Research Team, Supporters, and Inception Team. Select representatives from different teams, diverse viewpoints and incentive points, and different stakeholders. With the development of the network, the governance mechanism will be further decentralized, with the purpose of increasing more representative opinions through DAO or multi-signature mechanisms.

Q17: Any dAPP on the chain needs data indexing, so the graph is equivalent to the middleware on Ethereum. Now that it is the end of the year, what do you think will be the development trend of DeFi in 2021?

Iris: Decentralized applications that embody real value, including Defi, will continue to develop in a good step-by-step manner.

Q18: How difficult is the technical implementation of The Graph? Can it embody the exploration spirit of blockchain decentralization?

Iris: With the launch of the mainnet, the global decentralized index and the opening of data APIs have become a reality. This is a major milestone in how people can collaborate and organize in a centralized way. The Graph has been used by many excellent projects in the field of Defi and Web3. With this network, the encryption community can work together with a strong incentive mechanism to inherit the traditional technology and financial fields to create a better system to allocate resources and create economic opportunities. .

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