Dec 22, 2020
What Google does for search, The Graph does for web3
We want to talk about how we will be able to access data in a decentralized way, now many of you might be asking that blockchain data is actually I am making use of Etherscan and other similar tools,but when you want to build decentralized applications and other applications,one of the first things that you will want to talk about is data.
The Graph is a protocol that has been 3 years in the making and it’s something a lot of projects are using, Uniswap, Balancer, and the rest of them and they just launched their main net a few days ago.
Problems that the graph are trying to solve
The problem is that there is a need for indexed data and when you talk about tools like Facebook, Google, and the rest of them, they are the powerful data mafias of the world and what the graph is trying to do is become a decentralized form of google, like Google you will be able to search for information and data
What Google does is: is this, for example, is a website, what google does is that it has some indexers, crawl data, index it, so that when you want to search for this data, you will be able to access it.
So what the Graph is doing is that as far as we are talking about web3 stack, any information that is on the blockchain, whether is on the chain or storage networks, it will be able to index everything and make it available for developers,
The problem is that Apps need indexed data, the next thing is that this data is not stored in one place, it’s stored across a lot of changes and the rest, there is the problem of the technical and financial constraint of building and maintaining a subgraph
So what it does is, how do we make it easy to query chains and networks and also makes Dapps possible.
ROLES IN THE NETWORK
There are 4 participants in the Network all working for a collective future.
Indexers: They build and maintain subgraphs. So for example,there is an app like Uniswap or others,they build a subgraph that can contain data for them.
For you to be an indexer, you will need to stake some tokens and run some nodes.
Curators: They help with quality control in the system by signaling to indexers which subgraph is worth indexing
Delegators: They are people who may not have the technical and time resources to be an indexer, they can delegate their tokens to a worthwhile Indexer and still earn rewards.
Consumers: They are the Dapp developers and others who make use of the data made available by The Graph.
Why this is very good is that if you are a software developer,you would have heard about GraphQL,a simple language developed by facebook to build APIs,you already know that APIs are very useful in software development,
What the Graph is doing is that it makes a decentralized approach to APIs that you will be able to access APIs in the most efficient way.
So what is the vision?
The vision is to bring about a better developer experience, so what that means is that our apps will not be said to be decentralized if there are components of it that are centralized, and that is why we are having things like ipfs as a base layer for content referencing and storage, we are having things like unstoppable domains for uncesonrable domain names, maybe Bluzelle or Filecoin for storing data and the rest of them,so what the Graph is actually trying to do is bring a unified way were all these data we should be able to query them.
Just like we have Chainlink an oracle provider to bring data into blockchain networks, The Graph is here to index anything data in web3
The Graph provides a unique way to help index blockchain data and make it available via simple APIs
Many of the dApps built using theGraph have been reported to have faster loading times,it also helps build dapps that are truly global and decentralized and finally create a whole new data market.
Token utility
It’s for staking, incentives for running nodes, payments in the network
So this is a brief overview of the graph, the token ticker is GRT and it’s listed on a number of exchanges, do not just look at the price.
I see this as the future of web3, no more Google
Let’s welcome The Graph: the decentralized Google
