What Is The Graph (GRT)?

The Graph is an indexing protocol for querying data for networks like Ethereum and IPFS, powering many applications in both DeFi and the broader Web3 ecosystem. Anyone can build and publish open APIs, called subgraphs, that applications can query using GraphQL to retrieve blockchain data. There is a hosted service in production that makes it easy for developers to get started building on The Graph and the decentralized network will be launching later this year. The Graph currently supports indexing data from Ethereum, IPFS and POA, with more networks coming soon. To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of The Graph. To date, over 3,000 subgraphs have been deployed by thousands of developers, for DApps like Uniswap, Synthetix, Aragon, AAVE, Gnosis, Balancer, Livepeer, DAOstack, Decentraland and many others. The Graph usage has been growing at over 50% MoM and hit over 7 billion queries during the month of September 2020. The Graph has a global community, including over 200 Indexer Nodes in the testnet and more than 2,000 Curators in the Curator Program as of October 2020. To fund network development, The Graph raised funds from community members, strategic VCs and influential individuals in the blockchain community including Coinbase Ventures, DCG, Framework, ParaFi Capital, CoinFund, DTC, Multicoin, Reciprocal Ventures, SPC, Tally Capital and others. The Graph Foundation also successfully completed a public GRT Sale with participation from 99 countries (not including the U.S.). To date as of November 2020, The Graph has raised ~$25M.

Who Are the Founders of The Graph?

The Graph team includes professionals from the Ethereum Foundation, OpenZeppelin, Decentraland, Orchid, MuleSoft leading up to the IPO and acquisition by Salesforce, Puppet, Redhat and Barclays. The initial co-founding team includes Yaniv Tal (project lead), Brandon Ramirez (research lead) and Jannis Pohlmann (tech lead). The founders have engineering backgrounds and have worked together for 5-8 years. Tal and Ramirez studied electrical engineering at USC and worked together at MuleSoft, an API developer tools company that underwent an IPO and sold to SalesForce. They previously co-founded a developer tools startup together and have spent a significant portion of their careers working to optimize the API stack. At their last startup, the founders built a custom framework on an immutable database called Datomic. The Graph was born from this vision to create immutable APIs and data access, using the GraphQL query language.