The Graph

Some people believe that blockchains and decentralized storage networks will be central in the “new web”, thanks to a high availability of such products. Validating data requires setting a node. Today blockchains are slow but it is to be resolved with new consensus algorithms, sharding and other technologies. The Graph aims to develop a protocol making data extraction from blockchains fast. Data in blockchains and storage networks is rarely stored in a format that can be consumed directly in dApps. They need to filter, sort, paginate, group, and join data before it can be fetched. Some wording applied in the business model description may be considered as too emotional as they are leaning on “bad monopolies”, “freedom of choice disappearing” and the staff like that. As we expect the strong business logic from projects in explaining their research, we see such explanations as redflags. The idea is great but The Graph is only focused on Ethereum blockchain that has unclear future with new faster blockchains arising tremendously. In addition, we did not find significant competitors in this niche. Moreover, we guess that such an infrastructure may be useless as blockchains’ teams are able to develop their own protocols overcoming this obstacle if it turns crucial

By using The Graph, developers can query a peer-to-peer network of indexing nodes using GraphQL and verify the results on a client. They’ll be able to deploy to public infrastructure they don’t have to manage and benefit from economies of scale. Queries are processed on a decentralized network insuring that data remains open and that dApps continue to run. The Graph users don’t have to trust teams to operate servers and developers can deploy to trustworthy public infrastructure. The Graph uses GraphQL, a query language that provides a powerful API to get exactly the data needed in a single request, seamlessly traversing and combining data sources. The development process is open and available for tracking on Github. Demo is available on the website – a user has to enter the data needed to extract, and the result is a code representing the data. Roadmap is unclear and only indicates the main streams of work. The detailed whitepaper is projected to be released soon before the tokensale. We guess that such an infrastructure may be useless as blockchains’ teams are able to develop their own protocols overcoming this obstacle if it is crucial

Token functions are not available yet, but currently we do not see how it may be applied good here. Regarding monetization, the team is looking at supporting paying per query as well as subscription models (similar to SLAs) but the precise token mechanics will be released as part of the coming white paper

Financial will be announced soon. As the idea is not likely to have a significant impact on the industry, we expect to see a valuation not exceeding 5M USD

The team includes 8 core members and 4 advisors. Project Lead has 8-years’ experience in software engineering having been a CEO in a few software startups. Co-founders Jannis Pohlmann (14 years in software engineering), Brandon Ramirez (10 years in software engineering, worked in Cisco and Microsoft), previously worked together on several startups with the Project Lead. Also, the team includes 3 other software engineers with significant relevant experience. The team has a lack of marketing, business and blockchain specialist