Announcing The Graph Foundation
Today we’re announcing the creation of The Graph Foundation to help steward The Graph into the future. This is Part 1 of 2 posts about The Graph’s governance.
Graph Protocol, Inc. has played an important role in developing ecosystem. From conceiving the original idea, designing Graph Protocol v1, building and refining Graph Node and associated tooling, driving the software’s adoption and growth; to producing a loved brand, fostering a vibrant community, and aligning the crypto ecosystem behind the vision.
Now as we prepare to launch The Graph Network, the community requires an independent organizational structure that can support the vibrance and diversity of The Graph’s ecosystem. There are already thousands of Indexers, Curators, Delegators, and Developers all over the world that are continuing to build on The Graph, and will look to The Graph Foundation for coordination and support.
As part of the creation, I’m proud to announce that Eva Beylin has been nominated to serve as Director of The Graph Foundation where she’ll continue what she’s started in steering and growing the ecosystem. This is a truly global community and The Graph Network will be a distributed, decentralized, and permissionless network with no geographic borders.
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The Graph Foundation’s mandate is to develop and grow The Graph’s ecosystem to ensure the long-term sustainability of The Graph Network.
The mandate includes but is not limited to:
- Distributing grants and ecosystem funding to projects building on The Graph
- Coordinating the technical governance process
- Educating developers about GraphQL, subgraphs and building dApps on Web3
- Participating in The Graph’s community building initiatives and onboarding network participants
- Promoting the vision of open data and serverless decentralized applications
- Further decentralizing governance of the protocol and resource allocation
- Experimenting with quadratic funding mechanisms for grant distribution
The Graph has always been committed to decentralization, so governance over the ecosystem and protocol will transition to the decentralized community. The Graph Foundation will be legally and financially accountable to The Graph Council that will oversee governance decisions. In Part 2 of this post, Brandon Ramirez will share more details about The Graph’s upcoming technical governance structure.
The Graph’s mission is to make fullstack decentralized applications possible with an indexing protocol for querying blockchains. We want to make decentralization real and ubiquitous. Bitcoin was the first blockchain that proved that crypto economics can be used to secure a global decentralized ledger. Ethereum expanded on that idea by making it possible to run user defined programs on blockchains, opening up a world of possibilities for designing protocols and economic systems that can run on a provably neutral substrate.
With the launch of our decentralized network, The Graph is arriving as a global data layer on top of blockchains and storage networks that provides an organizing and unifying force for the decentralization movement. We’re solving the last mile problem of efficiently serving clients with verifiable data, enabling amazing product experiences that can go head to head against Web2 apps and win. The Graph Foundation will focus on proliferating this vision of open data built on Web3 and providing support to network participants and developers as The Graph Network matures and expands multi-blockchain.
About the Team
I first met Eva at a Dharma Demo Day in February 2019. The Graph needed somebody to help us tell our story better since at the time the only people that really knew The Graph were hardcore Ethereum developers. Eva previously worked with the EF and OmiseGO. Before crypto she was a management consultant which gave her an acute understanding of data, financials, and business strategy.
While immersed in crypto, she recognized that even though blockchains were producing enormous amounts of open data, the tools for making sense of that data were proprietary and run by centralized services. Eva understood early that the crypto ecosystem couldn’t be built on proprietary tools and gated access to data. She also realized that data markets desperately need to be democratized, opening access for anyone to participate and get rewarded for their work. Eva then joined us on our mission as Ecosystem Lead.
Eva’s one of the true believers that gets the value of decentralization and how transformative this technology can be when built the right way. She sees the big picture and has a long term view of what we’re building. We’re lucky to have her stewarding the ecosystem as Director of The Graph Foundation and guiding the progressive decentralization of The Graph’s governance.
As part of this transition I’m also excited to share that the initial team is changing our name from Graph Protocol, Inc. to Edge & Node! This change is meant to highlight the fact that we will no longer be the central team developing and promoting the protocol following the network’s launch. We’re excited to see more and more teams contributing and taking over development and community functions. Following the launch, we will have made good on our commitments to build and launch the decentralized network. We want to be explicit that the community should have no expectations of future development and managerial efforts from Edge & Node.
That said, we are a team of passionate builders and entrepreneurs that want to see Web3 and DeFi become the future of the internet and finance. We believe that most of it will be built on The Graph and we’re excited to work with the entire ecosystem to dream and build that vibrant decentralized future into existence.
Edge & Node will do its thing on the side. The Graph Foundation and the broader ecosystem will take it from here.
About The Graph
is the source of data and information for the decentralized internet. As the original decentralized data marketplace that introduced and standardized subgraphs, The Graph has become web3’s method of indexing and accessing blockchain data. Since its launch in 2018, tens of thousands of developers have for dapps across 80+ blockchains - including Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, Celo, Fantom, Gnosis, and Avalanche.
As demand for data in web3 continues to grow, The Graph enters a with a more expansive vision including new data services and query languages, ensuring the decentralized protocol can serve any use case - now and into the future.
Discover more about how The Graph is shaping the future of decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) and stay connected with the community. Follow The Graph on , , , , , and . Join the community on The Graph’s , join technical discussions on The Graph’s .
oversees The Graph Network. The Graph Foundation is overseen by the . , , , , , and are eight of the many organizations within The Graph ecosystem.
