Case Study: Top Ledger Saved $9,000 Monthly and Achieved 5x Faster Solana Data Processing with The Graph’s Substreams

Top Ledger provides enterprise-grade blockchain analytics and notification systems on Solana covering 40 plus DEX programs, SPL transfers, and much more. Top Ledger’s platform powers wallet performance tracking, profit and loss calculations, and token launch analytics for its institutional clients.

When Top Ledger needed to simultaneously reduce engineering overhead and improve reliability they turned to Substreams on The Graph. Substreams enabled them to achieve 1-2 second end-to-end latency, and scale coverage without increasing team size.

The Problem: $12K Monthly Infrastructure Costs and up to 5-Second Delays

As demand grew Top Ledger’s RPC and Geyser-based pipelines became increasingly difficult to maintain, resulting in high costs, slow sync times, and data gaps.

The previous infrastructure burden included:

• $10,000-12,000 monthly infrastructure costs to run and maintain Solana validator nodes, archival storage, and high-availability RPC endpoints.
• Two full-time engineers dedicated to maintaining ingestion pipelines and addressing challenges like block re-orgs, RPC rate limits, and data consistency.
• During Solana congestion or validator restarts, RPC polling often missed inner instructions, account-level state changes, and transactional context.
• Prone to missed events or duplicate ingestion under load with high-volume programs, such as Raydium and Jupiter.
• End-to-end latency was up to 5 seconds from block production to decoded events.
• 1-2 weeks for historical syncing for new Solana programs.

The Solution: Integrating Substreams for Real-Time Solana Data

Top Ledger replaced their custom infrastructure with Substreams on The Graph, eliminating the need to maintain the low-level ingestion while improving every aspect of their data pipeline. The solution had to handle Solana's complex architecture and high throughput.

1. Real-Time Streams: Substreams provided real-time streams of both account and transaction data, enabling Top Ledger to focus entirely on decoding, enriching, and delivering analytics to clients.
2. Complete Block Coverage: Substreams delivered complete block-by-block streams including real-time account state updates. This eliminated the data gaps that plagued their RPC-based approach during network congestion.
3. Backfills: Substreams provided access to deterministic historical backfills, enabling accurate account histories, first-buy timestamps, and P&L calculations.
4. Direct Database Sinks: Substreams sinks push decoded Solana data directly into databases such as PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, and PubSub. This eliminated intermediate ETL layers, dramatically simplifying data pipelines and reducing operational complexity.
5. Reorg Handling: Substreams manages Solana’s frequent reorgs natively, ensuring data remains consistent without needing custom rollback logic.

Result: 65% Cost Reduction with 5x Performance Improvement

The Substreams integration delivered measurable results across engineering, efficiency, performance, and costs.

Cost Savings:

• 60-65% infrastructure cost reduction, saving $6,000-$ 8,000 monthly compared to their previous approach.
• Engineering time savings resulted in an estimated $3,000-$ 5,000 per month in effective productivity gains.

Performance Improvements:

• 5-6x faster historical backfill. What previously took 1-2 weeks now completes in a few days, depending upon the program.
• >70% latency reduction. Real-time processing latency dropped from 3-5+ seconds to 1-2 seconds with potential subsecond performance. This enabled them to power true real-time analytics and notification systems for clients such as trading firms and Telegram bots.

Engineering Efficiency Gains:

• 30-40% monthly engineering time savings compared to their previous approach.
• One full-time engineer, previously focused on infrastructure maintenance, is now fully dedicated to building new parsers and client-facing analytics pipelines.

Horizontal Scalability:

• Substreams’ sinks allowed them to scale multiple downstream consumers independently, such as one for real-time analytics (wallet notifications) and another for research workloads (PnL backtesting, token launch analysis), all without overloading a single pipeline.

Take Away

Substreams helped Top Ledger evolve from just indexing raw Solana data to offering a real-time SQL-based data discovery and analytics platform. They now reliably power real-time analytics for institutional trading clients without overspending on infrastructure or compromising on performance.

“By integrating Substreams, we’ve eliminated the burden of low-level Solana infrastructure and cut down engineering overhead by nearly 40%. It’s allowed us to scale faster, ship new program support in days instead of weeks, and deliver real-time analytics to our most demanding trading clients.”

— Nitin Shukla, CEO of Top Ledger

About The Graph

The Graph  is the leading indexing and query protocol powering the decentralized internet. Since launching in 2018, it has empowered tens of thousands of developers to effortlessly build  Subgraphs  and leverage  Substreams  across countless blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, Celo, Soneium, and Avalanche. With powerful tools like Substreams and Token API, The Graph delivers high-performance, real-time access to onchain data. From low-latency indexing to rapid token data, it serves as the premier solution for building composable, data drive dapps.

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