The Graph Protocol — Indexer prospective

grassets
3 min readDec 22, 2020

The Graph network went live at 17:00 UTC on 17 December 2020!

The Graph has created decentralised digital economy to boost dApp development, DeFi and beyond.

The Graph economy is build around Query Marketplace.

At the time of writing, the query market is still being run by The Graph team in a centralised manner, however PoolTogether is already on its way to the fully decentralised future!

The success of The Graph vision can not be emphasised more than simply looking at the dynamics of queries reaching the market! From one billion query per month in June to over ten billion in November.

The Graph team designed the marketplace with a vision for it to function and be successful no matter what. The sophisticated composite of technology, different roles and incentives architected from the ground up to the scale which is truly unique!

One of the fundamental roles within The Graph ecosystem is an Indexer. Indexers are highly technical professionals across the globe who run graph-nodes at the center of their clusters and in accordance to their capabilities to provide the query market with required data.

On the open market, everyone can be an Indexer and thus The Graph team has taken various steps to ensure consumers are getting quality data in response to the query they pay for. Main mechanism to reward Indexers for quality query responses is in a form of Query Fee . For the time while there isn’t sufficient amount of query on the particular market segment (subgraph), Indexers are incentivised to index new data sets and provide query responses via Indexing Reward. On the other side Indexers are at risk of slashing on their own stake for inconsistent indexing or incorrect query responses.

To secure the protocol, Delegators delegate their stakes to Indexers for the portion of rewards that indexers make. Unlike Indexers, Delegators can not be slashed for bad behaviour, however they pay protocol tax for pure decision making to encourage long term protocol integrity. Considering significant diversity among Indexers, Delegators are better off making their own due diligence very carefully. As the network matures, there will be more data and ways to help with decision making, but at the early days of the network it is most advisable to approach experienced Indexers who helped The Graph team to test the protocol before launch.

Grassets.tech is a joint venture between like minded, long term oriented, testnet Indexers. We are in a process of finalising our strategy. Please stay tuned or reach out with any enquiries you may have.

contact@grassets.tech or https://t.me/grassets.

update: we have locked our reward cuts for the first indexer until end of April to provide peace of mind to our delegators. Delegators are no longer need to worry about sudden Indexer fee changes.

grassets-tech-1 0x45874192929530cd4e3dd0624df05bee3c13974f

update1: we have set indicative reward cuts on the second indexer and will be adjusting reward cuts to ensure our fees on delegations are below 20%

grassets-tech-2 0x720a98087160bfdb282f695abe6f9ac966b03d43

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