The Graph Protocol — Why do I believe in it?

A new critical infrastructure component of the blockchain stack and, for a change, fully decentralized.

For a long time now, I’ve been challenging my buidlers colleagues and providers of decentralized applications, protocols, and infrastructure, to think of a hypothetical moment when critical infrastructures such as access to Ethereum nodes (eg.: Infura and Alchemy) and/or block explorers (eg.: Etherescan) are down for hours, days, or even weeks.
How many oracles, bots, dApps (web and mobile), etc, will keep working?

Over the last several months, it’s been proven without a doubt that The Graph Protocol has become a key infrastructure component of the blockchain stack (and it just started with Ethereum and IPFS). But this time, differently from the other previously mentioned services, The Graph Protocol was thought to be decentralized since inception and I am so excited it has finally launched mainnet.

Decentralization brings censorship-resistance, borderless operations, resiliency, immutability, cryptographic proofs that the different players are behaving correctly, or they will be penalized. Neither The Graph company nor other entities can take it down.

As part of the protocol bootstrapping, The Graph Protocol team has incentivized the different protocol’s roles through native protocol token awards (GRT) to help bootstrapping the supply and demand, as well as the protocol economics and subgraphs creation/signaling/curation. I am participating as a curator and here I would like to share my answers to the curator program phase 4, mission 2 questions:

• Why do you believe in The Graph? What inspires you?
  Product/market fit. A great team with a lot of brainpower which also ships. Vibrant community. Decentralization.
• Why is The Graph critical to Web3?
  The Graph Protocol solves the problem which is causing pain every day for hundreds of developers. It leverages reusability and boosts productivity and time-to-market by more than 10x. It also enormously contributes to User Experience buy drastically increasing response time and lowering the ‘Connect Wallet before doing anything’ friction.
• Which subgraphs are the most critical for Web3 and why?
  A new big wave of new users is already here. I would say the most critical SGs are those which help to onboard them into decentralized applications, starting with those to build very simple DeFi use cases such as Saving Accounts, Borrowing, Lending, etc. Eg.: Compound v2, Maker, AAVE, etc. A new subgraph that can aggregate all of them would be great.
• What have you learned during the Curator Program?
  I’ve been following The Graph Protocol since ethDenver 2019. I studied it and contributed to it. Not much to learn from the protocol itself. However, I am fascinated by the number of people interested in participating who managed to learn and contribute. And also by The Graph team who made it happen. As I tell them, I interact with many projects and startups, however, I see very very few who can execute these programs and bootstrapping mechanisms so well. Kudos to the team.
• What are you excited about when curation goes live on mainnet?
  We have helped test the protocol and its economics during the test net. The Protocol Economic is not trivial at all. Indexers, delegators, subgraph creators, subgraphs users, all the ecosystem will start interacting with the real rules. Once The Graph Protocol Foundation starts reducing the FREE access to their hosted infrastructure, I am very excited to see the new ways all the participants will interact with each other. I see new companies and even DAOs arising. Very exciting times.

Let’s continue building this ecosystem my fellow indexers, curators, subgraph developers, and consumers. There is no other way than UP!