January 21, 2022 — The Graph Foundation announced today it has raised $50 million in funding led by Tiger Global with participation from FinTech Collective, Fenbushi Capital, Reciprocal Ventures, and Blockwall Digital Assets Fund.
Over the next two years, The Graph Foundation will allocate funds toward acquiring core developers (or development teams) to focus on solving key centralization, security, and scalability challenges in web3.
The Graph is a protocol for indexing and querying blockchain data via open source APIs, called subgraphs, that let developers easily access that data. The Graph accelerates web3 development and adoption by providing open access to a growing repository of organized, structured blockchain data. It has seen the number of developers using subgraphs across its hosted service and decentralized network growing at 550% YoY.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has also acknowledged the project’s steady momentum, noting that:
“The Graph is a protocol that a lot of applications are switching to already. [These applications] stopped using Ethereum’s native event log grabbing and [are using] The Graph because [it’s easier] and faster.”
The Graph lowers the barrier to entry of dapp development by enabling easier access to historical blockchain data, including data about DeFi, DAOs and NFTs in web3. Using subgraphs saves developers time and is more efficient than indexing themselves.
Efficient indexing and querying on a decentralized network is a fundamental need for building consumer- and business-facing dapps in web3. Similar to how search engines index and organize all information on the internet and enable billions of people to easily search across web pages, online news articles, research, videos and more, The Graph is doing the same for web3 data, which is data on blockchains. Decentralized applications, or dapps, that have migrated over to the network have generated over 265,000 GRT in query fees to date.
“The responsibility of true decentralization doesn’t rely solely on the protocols themselves, but on the full infrastructure stack, and all the way up to the interfaces that users connect with,” said Sean Lippel, Partner & Head of Digital Assets, FinTech Collective. “We consistently hear from our portfolio companies that they prefer to utilize only one decentralized API environment, The Graph, for blockchain data. We are excited to back a team that continues to push the boundaries for indexing the web3 world at scale and believe The Graph will continue to cement its position as critical infrastructure for DeFi, NFTs, DAOs and beyond.”
In 2021, The Graph Foundation awarded four new core dev grants to StreamingFast, Figment, Semiotic and The Guild to collaborate on The Graph’s roadmap. This includes focus on Indexer and node infrastructure improvements, subgraph tooling, more efficient data streaming, cryptography and more. In support of the growth of the web3 ecosystem, The Graph Foundation has issued $250 million in developer grants to accelerate network development.
“The Graph has the potential to become a generational platform,” said John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global. “We expect to see an exponential increase in the data being stored on blockchains, especially given the pace at which the trillion dollar market has been growing over the past year. The Graph is one of the most important pillars of the decentralized web.”
“The Graph provides mission-critical decentralized infrastructure for web3 applications. The protocol’s growth has been astonishing, and this is just the beginning of their journey. Web3 is quickly becoming a multi-chain ecosystem and one of the most compelling features of The Graph is its ability to work across blockchains. The Graph is the unifying layer of web3, and will continue integrating more blockchains, including Solana and Cosmos, as the ecosystem grows,” said Craig Burel, Partner at Reciprocal Ventures.
Using The Graph, anyone can construct open APIs to pull data from a growing ecosystem of blockchain networks, publish them to The Graph’s decentralized network and contribute to the repository of subgraphs that can be queried by any Dapp or platform.
To date, The Graph’s open APIs, or subgraphs, power applications such as Uniswap, Synthetix, KnownOrigin, Gnosis, Balancer, Livepeer, DAOstack, Audius, Decentraland, and many others. Subgraphs are used to index data from the fastest growing blockchain networks, including Ethereum, NEAR, Arbitrium, Optimism, Polygon, Avalanche, Celo, Fantom, Moonbeam, IPFS, PoA and more. These chains are already supported on the hosted service and will be supported by the decentralized network this year.
About The Graph
The Graph is the indexing and query layer of web3. Utilizing GraphQL, developers can query existing subgraphs – or open APIs – in the Graph Explorer or use Subgraph Studio to build and publish subgraphs on The Graph’s hosted service or directly on the Graph Network. Currently, The Graph supports indexing data from 26 different blockchain networks, including Ethereum, NEAR, Arbitrium, Optimism, Polygon, Avalanche, Celo, Fantom, Moonbeam, IPFS, PoA and more.
To date, over 25,000 developers have built subgraphs for applications such as Uniswap, Synthetix, KnownOrigin, Gnosis, Balancer, Livepeer, DAOstack, Audius, Decentraland, and many others. The Graph Foundation oversees The Graph Network. Edge & Node, StreamingFast and Figment are three of the many organizations within The Graph ecosystem. For more information, please visit The Graph’s website or follow its blog, Github, or Twitter.
About The Graph Foundation
The Graph Foundation oversees and stewards the growing ecosystem of Indexers, Curators, Delegators, and Developers all over the world that are building on The Graph. The independent organization oversees the distribution of grants and funding to projects building on The Graph, coordinates the technical governance process, educates developers about GraphQL, subgraphs and building dApps on web3, and promotes the vision of open data and serverless decentralized applications. Its mandate is to further decentralize the governance of The Graph protocol and to allocate resources to accelerate The Graph’s community-building initiatives.
For more information, please visit The Graph Foundation here.