Case Study: Amberdata Accelerates Blockchain Indexing by 72,000% with Substreams

Amberdata, the leading provider of digital asset data and analytics infrastructure, empowers institutions with comprehensive insights into on-chain and market activity. From liquidity in decentralized exchanges to accurate portfolio tracking, it delivers vital data that enables users to make informed and impactful decisions. As digital asset ecosystems rapidly expand, teams like Amberdata must quickly and accurately index new protocols and chains to maintain a competitive edge.

Amberdata adopted The Graph’s Substreams to scale its data pipelines. Substreams enables the company to index blockchain data up to 72,000% faster, slash infrastructure costs by over 70%, and onboard new chains in just days, helping Amberdata continue to lead in the market.

The Indexing Challenge

Amberdata’s initial approach relied on direct RPC calls to blockchain nodes, requiring thousands of requests per block to extract critical data. This method created three core challenges:

• Time-to-Market: Amberdata wanted to increase its speed to market to add support for new blockchains.
• High Costs: Significant RPC call volumes led to high provider fees and infrastructure expenses.
• Historical Data: Amberdata wanted to improve its speed and reduce effort in collecting and enriching historical blockchain data.

“Improving time-to-market and reducing effort and cost were critical goals,” explains the Amberdata team. “We believed that implementing Substreams could help us achieve them and maintain market leadership.”

The Substreams Solution

By integrating Substreams, Amberdata unlocked a modular, parallelized framework for streaming blockchain data. Substreams’ real-time processing capabilities and chain-agnostic design enabled the team to:

• Index New Chains: Substreams-supported blockchains are now much quicker to onboard.
• Enrich Data Models: Access comprehensive data—blocks, transactions, token balances, DEX swaps, and account activity—with full historical context.
• Eliminate RPC Bottlenecks: Replace thousands of RPC calls with streamlined data streams, reducing latency and infrastructure overhead.

Amberdata leveraged Substreams’ parallelization capabilities to orchestrate Kubernetes clusters, processing data across 50 pods and 10 EC2 nodes much more efficiently. This “fire and forget” approach minimized engineering maintenance while maximizing scalability.

Key Results:

• Over 70,000% Faster Indexing: Reduced blockchain indexing time significantly.
• Up to 70% Lower Provider Costs: Reduced ongoing expenses from $2,500 to $850 per chain, per month, and slashed one-time data collection costs from $40,000 to $3,500 per chain.
• Enterprise-Grade Accuracy: Zero discrepancies found in data models compared to node providers during PoC testing.
• Real-Time Wallet Tracking: Enabled granular insights into account balance changes and DeFi activity.

“Substreams fundamentally changed our approach,” says the Amberdata team. “We are able to maintain market leadership by adding datasets for Substreams-enabled chains quicker than before. The performance gains are significant.”

Conclusion

Amberdata’s integration of Substreams set a new standard for blockchain data. By eliminating RPC limitations and unlocking near-instant indexing, Amberdata now delivers actionable insights quickly, affordably, and with unmatched reliability.

As blockchain ecosystems continue to evolve, Substreams ensures Amberdata remains at the forefront of innovation—empowering institutions to navigate DeFi, track portfolios, and capitalize on emerging opportunities with confidence.

Build with Substreams and transform your data pipeline today.

About The Graph

The Graph  is the leading indexing and query protocol powering the decentralized internet. Launched in 2018, it has enabled tens of thousands of developers to effortlessly build  Subgraphs  and   Substreams  across countless blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, Celo, Soneium, and Avalanche.

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  X,  LinkedIn,  Instagram,  Facebook,  Reddit,  Farcaster  and  Medium. Join the community on The Graph’s  Telegram, join technical discussions on The Graph’s  Discord.

The Graph Foundation  oversees The Graph Network.  Edge & Node,  StreamingFast,  Semiotic Labs,  GraphOps,  Pinax   Wonderland  and  Geo  are seven of the many organizations within The Graph ecosystem.