October 2026 in Review
In Q3, The Graph put its growth behind The Graph Network and the Indexers who run it. October was the month that plan started to show results.
BSC and Polygon traffic left the Subgraph Studio staging environment and moved to Network Indexers. The Rewards Eligibility Oracle raised its service bar twice. Substreams got faster and reached more chains, while low-usage networks left Subgraph Studio.
Every item below came up on Graph Office Hours, the weekly open call for Indexers, developers, Delegators and The Graph Foundation.
1. Studio Traffic Lands on the Network
On October 8, Studio staging queries ended for BNB Smart Chain and Polygon Subgraphs. Those queries now go to The Graph Network where Indexers serve them and collect the query fees. Cleanup followed through October 30th with the Upgrade Indexer unallocating from about 214 Subgraphs that the Network already supports and 551 inactive Matic and BSC Subgraphs that were deleted.
By October 27, fewer than 78 of the original 860+ BSC and Polygon Subgraphs remained in Studio. The Upgrade Indexer's total scope had dropped from 3,417 allocations to 1,723, and no major issues came up during the migration. Studio support for other chains winds down chain by chain over the coming weeks.
If your Subgraph is already published and queried on the Network, nothing changes. If your Subgraph runs only on the Studio staging endpoint, take these steps:
- Publish the Subgraph to The Graph Network.
- Set up billing and an API key in Studio.
- Switch your app to a Gateway endpoint.
2. The Rewards Eligibility Oracle Keeps Rising
The gives indexing rewards only to Indexers that serve queries. In October, the Daily Query Requirement rose twice:
- October 6th: from 1 to 5 qualifying Subgraphs per online day.
- October 27th: from 5 to 10 qualifying Subgraphs per online day.
All other criteria stay the same. An Indexer needs 5 or more online days in a rolling 28-day window. A qualifying query returns HTTP 200, responds in under 5,000 ms, and is less than 50,000 blocks behind chainhead. Total issuance stays the same, and REO decides which Indexers receive it.
On November 2, the Foundation published . It reports what each step changed for Indexers, GRT and Delegators, using on-chain data and gateway query logs. Highlights from the report:
- About 667,000 GRT withheld: that GRT built up on the allocations of Indexers that failed REO. It went to the reclaim contract instead of to those Indexers. No decision has been made on how reclaimed GRT will be used.
- Indexers stepped up: eligible Indexers rose from 51 at enforcement on August 25 to 55 on October 5. Four Indexers qualified for the first time, and three of them went from serving on 0% of days to 79%.
- The 5-Subgraph rule worked as designed: from October 6 to October 26, eligible Indexers fell from 55 to 48. The Indexers that lost eligibility did not serve at least 5 Subgraphs on enough days. Rewards paid per day held steady, at 636K GRT against 622K before the change.
- The 10-Subgraph rule is still settling: on October 29, 47 Indexers were eligible. An Indexer renewed before October 27 keeps its eligibility for the rest of its 14-day period, so the full effect shows by about November 10. Modeling projected 42 eligible Indexers, claiming 92.7% of indexing rewards.
- Delegators have started to act but still have more to do: almost all GRT undelegated from failing Indexers came from Indexers that never qualified. Even so, 79.0M GRT was still delegated to Indexers failing REO on October 29.
Eligible counts in the report include Indexers in grace, which the lists separately. Each change comes with about 14 days of notice. Indexers that already qualify finish their current period under the old criteria. Indexers have asked for the bar to rise faster. The Foundation will measure how the network responds to the October 27 change before it proposes any further changes.
3. More Substreams Chains, Fewer Idle Networks
Chain support moved in two directions in October. Firehose and Substreams coverage kept growing on active chains. At the same time, smaller L2s and networks without enough usage left Subgraph Studio. The result is a chain list that better matches where developers and data consumers need data.
More chains on Substreams. Ink is now supported on Firehose and Substreams with Extended Blocks, built by Pinax and listed in v0.8.8. Extended Blocks add full call traces, native balance changes, storage diffs and contract code changes. A standard RPC endpoint leaves those out. Pinax operates the Arc, HyperEVM and Ink endpoints. Here’s what happened since the start of Q3:
- Arc: Firehose and Substreams with Extended Blocks, alongside Subgraphs.
- HyperEVM: Firehose and Substreams upgraded to Extended Blocks.
- Robinhood Chain: additional Firehose and Substreams providers, plus testnet support.
- Anubis: Subgraphs, with InfraDAO as backstop Indexer.
Deprecations. These networks were deprecated and removed from Subgraph Studio:
- October 16: near-mainnet, near-testnet
- October 19: fuse, fuse-testnet
- October 21: soneium, soneium-testnet, kaia, kaia-testnet, zksync-era-sepolia, arbitrum-nova, monad-testnet, viction, and fantom (with select historical support for existing users)
- November 2: botanix, botanix-testnet, the last deprecation on the current schedule
Soneium keeps its Substreams support. The networks registry and the Supported Networks docs reflect these changes.
4. Substreams v0.8.0 is Faster
Substreams v0.8.0 switches its Rust protobuf bindings from prost to buffa. Protobuf decoding can take up to 90% of the compute for a single block, so the gain is largest on busy chains like Base and Solana.
- Modules decode blocks 2.9x to 4.9x faster, depending on the chain.
- A 1.5M-block Uniswap v4 backfill on Ethereum dropped from 342 s to 118 s.
- The wire format is unchanged. Packages, cached outputs, sinks, and Go and JS consumers keep working.
- The upgrade is opt-in and requires Substreams CLI v1.25.0 or later. New projects from substreams init use buffa.
5. Releases Across the Stack
Subgraph Studio 1.5.0 improved login and session handling across wallet changes, page refreshes and browser tabs. You can now choose a session duration and require wallet confirmations for sensitive actions. Publishing tracks and recovers transactions better, including pending, rejected and failed Safe transactions. Existing users had to sign in again after the upgrade.
Subgraph Studio v1.6.0 adds ENS v2 support, built on the stable Components releases.
Graph Explorer v1.2.0 adds ENS v2 support. Delegation now has slippage protection and blocks delegation into unhealthy pools.
indexer-agent and indexer-cli v0.25.12 collect remaining fees after a partial RAV collection and pass network subgraph query failures through instead of hiding them. The release also adds a new feature support matrix and raises the minimum graph-node version. Indexers should upgrade.
Graph Node is in a stabilization phase as development moves to InfraDAO with two experienced Graph Node engineers involved. For the next one to two months, the work is open community PRs, critical fixes, security patches and dependency updates. Issues created in 2025 or earlier will be closed. If one still matters to you, reopen it or leave a comment. Questions go to #indexer-software on Discord.
Docs v2.1.10 reads Supported Networks details from the networks registry. Pages for deprecated networks redirect to /supported-networks/. The Subgraphs pages walk through Studio with a five-step Quick Start.
6. AI Agents Pay Per Query with x402
runs a marketplace where AI agents find and pay for APIs. The Graph is a verified partner, and the listing exposed 20 Subgraph endpoints as of October 19, including Aerodrome, Uniswap, Aave and Compound on Base.
Each call goes to The Graph's x402 gateway. The agent pays $0.01 in USDC on Base per query, with no API key or account. vAPI runs a gateway business on top of The Graph's canonical gateway and x402. It does not run its own Subgraph gateway infrastructure. The Foundation expects more AI marketplaces like this one, and AI usage is a priority for the coming months.
7. Foundation Initiatives in Progress
- Multi-Gateway Plan: a Foundation proposal for how it will run its canonical gateway and work with external gateways. The plan has gone to The Graph Council for review and will likely be shared with community members in November.
- Subgraph Studio pricing: a Foundation proposal for a simpler pricing model before any change reaches users. The timeline for this change is still in the range of months away.
- Liquid Staking: Still holding in Phase 1, which is a small soft launch. Unfortunately, Avantgarde Finance, which operated the vault day to day while the Foundation managed it, announced that it is winding down. The Foundation appreciates Avantgarde’s contributions and wants to thank them for all their support. As a result of this change, the Foundation is lining up a new operator. Phase 2 brings UI updates and a new liquid staking partner.
- Direct Indexer Payments: the contracts are deployed and dormant, so indexing rewards do not change today. Release is slated for later this year.
8. Graph Office Hours in October
Graph Office Hours runs every Tuesday at 17:00 UTC on the Discord stage, with a forum summary after each session.
- : Q3 in review, Ink on Substreams, the BSC and Polygon cutover
- : Chain deprecations, Studio 1.5.0, Graph Node stabilization
- : Substreams 0.8.0, vAPI, Aero, ENSv2, the REO direction
- : Studio progress, new releases, REO at 10 Subgraphs
About The Graph
The Graph is a suite of blockchain data infrastructure products that extract, process, and deliver scalable blockchain data solutions across 60+ networks. The Graph enables application developers, data analysts, AI agents, and enterprise teams that need structured, real-time access to blockchain data. Products include Subgraphs, Firehose, Substreams, and Amp. As of early 2026, The Graph has served over 1.27 trillion queries to more than 75,000 projects, powered by a network of independent Indexers around the world.
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