The Graph Ecosystem hosted its first community conference post-pandemic and saw more than 1,000 attendees join for the biggest Web3 event in San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts. The four-day affair, titled “Graph Day and Hack,” brought together builders, creators, investors and Web3 enthusiasts from around the world for a full day of presentations from ecosystem partners that included The Graph Foundation, Edge and Node, StreamingFast, Semiotic Labs and more.
The Graph, which has been used to empower 560 billion queries, is a critical layer of Web3 development. It provides a way to easily index blockchain data and deploy APIs that can be used in any app or platform. With a focus on developing decentralized technologies that enable human collaboration in a brand-new way, Graph Day participants were given an inside look into the state of The Graph’s decentralized network, new products launching that are powered by The Graph, and technological advancements for building the next generation of Web3 apps and platforms.
CEO of Edge and Node Yaniv Tal announced formal plans for sunsetting The Graph’s Hosted Service, with subgraphs currently slated for deployment by Q1 2023. This will enable all Web3 apps to retrieve blockchain data in a decentralized way, eliminating a central point of failure for applications that are retrieving blockchain data using subgraph APIs.
As a part of The Graph’s progression toward decentralizing, where subgraphs are hosted and accessed, the protocol’s ecosystem introduced a number of improvements on Graph Day that will be critical to scaling for mass adoption. These improvements include the implementation of new substreams to expedite the speed of indexing blockchain data, the standardization of subgraph indexing led by new core developer Messari, and an upcoming proposal that will bring the protocol to Arbitrum, a layer-2 solution.
One of the biggest highlights of Graph Day was the unveiling of Geo, the first native Web3 browser powered by The Graph. Geo is a portal to the first verifiable web in which participants can contribute to ensuring the accuracy of data and information on the internet. With Geo, anyone can participate in verifying and voting on changes to publicly available information. Users can join the beta waitlist on the site.
Following Graph Day is a three-day hackathon with $450,000 in bounties that invites developers to build new applications and use cases for The Graph and other important Web3 technologies. Sponsors include Coinbase, NEAR, Celo, Polygon, Figment, Filecoin, Decentraland, the Ethereum Foundation, BNB Chain, Chainlink, Avalanche, Ledger, Uniswap Grants and more.