The Graph Foundation Supports Ecosystem Growth with New Wave of Grants

The Graph ecosystem continues to branch out in diverse directions to support the visions of developers, community builders, and innovators. Contributors globally continue to build on top of The Graph, supporting protocol R&D, Indexer and subgraph tooling, developing the subgraph and substream ecosystems, and growing the community. These blossoming projects are further supported by The Graph Foundation’s grants program.

The Graph Foundation is pleased to announce a new cohort of grantees in Wave 7 of the grants program, allocating over $400,000 in grants towards improving the protocol, supporting dapps building on The Graph, creating new tools, and nurturing community growth.

This wave also represents a new chapter in decentralizing the grants program itself. While the Foundation still stewards the Graph Grants program today, the pool is expanding with two ecosystem DAOs: Graph AdvocatesDAO and SubgraphDAO, which are maturing to be able to take on larger grants. The Graph AdvocatesDAO, which launched in Q1, focuses on community grants, supporting the ecosystem and taking lead on events, hackathons, translations and community development. The SubgraphDAO is in its early stages, but will focus on subgraph bounties and grants, migration, and continuous subgraph support to the dapp and developer community.

In the last wave, The Graph Foundation delegated the responsibility of allocating community grants valued under $20,000 to the Graph AdvocatesDAO, a community-owned and led DAO that enables anyone to contribute in educating and supporting The Graph community. The Graph Foundation also continues to support the community in bootstrapping the SubgraphDAO that will pave the way for a future where subgraph-related grants can be voted on in a decentralized way by builders, maintainers, and users of subgraphs.

Decentralizing the grants program is another step towards decentralization and empowering community members the opportunity to enhance The Graph Network with their contributions.

Want to take part in the decentralized grants mission? Find out more about how you can contribute to The Graph ecosystem through the Graph Advocates program!

Wave 7 Grant Recipients

In the Wave 7 review process, each applicant was assessed based on their project’s expected impact, community feedback, relative significance and urgency in the ecosystem. All grants are paid in GRT to be used in The Graph Network and to further enable participation in web3.

Check out highlights from the latest wave of grants:

Protocol Infrastructure ~$155K

• Playgrounds - Subgrounds - $100,000
• Soulbound Studio - No-Code Subgraph Scaffolder GUI - $50,000
• LimeChain - Matchstick and Hardhat Plugin Maintenance - $5,040

Tooling ~$30K

• ChainLook - Decentralized Blockchain Analytics Platform - $30,000

Dapps and Subgraphs ~$27K

• Subgraph Development - tr3butor - $3,000
• Subgraph Development - Connect3 - $3,000
• Subgraph Development - Prime Rating - $3,000
• Subgraph Development - Phezzan Protocol - $3,000
• Subgraph Development - coNFT - $2,500
• Subgraph Development - Uquid - $2,500
• Subgraph Development - Merlin - $2,000
• Subgraph Development - Mozaic - $2,000
• Subgraph Development - snd.xyz - $2,000
• Subgraph Development - Nomis - $1,500
• Subgraph Development - Mad Finance - $1,500
• Subgraph Development - E-fectivo - $1,000
• Community Building ~$189K
• Graphtronauts - Community Building & Support - $30,000
• GRTiQ Podcast - $30,000
• Graphrica - Community Building $30,000
• Dacade - $25,000
• Future Proof - Sponsorship $25,000
• Technical Writing - Sean Moore - $21,600
• The Index Podcast - $11,500
• Community Support - Ahmad Mardeni - $9,000
• Community Support - Jerry Zhang - $7,500

Applications were evaluated by Graph Domain Experts — members of the community, The Graph Council, core dev teams and other builders in The Graph ecosystem. The Foundation is seeking more support from Domain Experts in the community; if you have expertise and are interested in contributing to our vision. Please reach out!

The Foundation is always focused on helping grantees succeed and is looking forward to reviewing submissions for the next wave of grants: Wave 8. Grantees are encouraged to share their ideas in The Graph Forum or across social channels to get feedback and input from the community before applying for a grant.

Evolving the Graph Grants Program

As the Foundation continues its focus on supporting the community treasury, many changes that make the grants program more successful for The Graph ecosystem and rewarding to contributors are also underway.

Introducing Retroactive Funding

To sustain and accelerate high quality projects, tools, and initiatives, the grants program will be augmented for Wave 8 with the introduction of retroactive funding as a new grant type. Retroactive grants funding has been experimented by many web3 protocols, including prompts from Vitalik Buterin and Optimism. The Graph will use retroactive funding to focus within the categories of tooling and protocol R&D, however any retroactive initiatives that the community feels are beneficial can be considered. Retroactive funding serves as a way to formally recognize positive contributions that have already been made to The Graph ecosystem, while incentivizing the continuation of those contributions and enabling the grants program to focus on high-impact projects.

While allocating grants might traditionally happen before ecosystem contributions begin, we hope the community will become more active in identifying ecosystem projects that have organically or proactively spun up without having applied for grants. Retroactive grants will be assessed per-grant and based on usage, impact, community feedback and general benefit to The Graph. The first retroactive grant was awarded to Soulbound Labs for their Soulbound Studio, a no-code subgraph scaffold that has helped new subgraph developers arise and enabled the development of reputation subgraphs with ease.

Transitioning Subgraph Grants

Moving forward, the Graph Grants program will no longer be funding subgraph grants and will focus on providing migration support and guiding developers to the SubgraphDAO. The SubgraphDAO will be providing migration bounties and subgraph grants (i.e., for providing support to dapps who are migrating), and additional funding for community support and solutions engineering. This will set up the SubgraphDAO to take on a pivotal role in the ecosystem to serve subgraph developers long-term. However, the Foundation will continue providing migration grants to support dapps migrating their subgraphs to the network. 25M GRT has been allocated to subgraph developers as part of the MIPs program, to help them migrate multi-chain subgraphs.

At each stage of decentralization, the Foundation looks forward to learning about innovative, original ideas built by the community. Please don’t hesitate to share them by applying for a grant or contacting us with your ideas! The application portal is always open, so submit your ideas for protocol improvement, tooling, and/or instrumentation.

Want to workshop your ideas first? Open a thread in The Graph Forum!

Wave 8: How You Can Get Involved

Grant applications are open year round! Even with the conclusion of Wave 7, things are already ramping up for Wave 8, with significant focus on education, tooling, and maturing the subgraph ecosystem.

Given the importance of a sustainable community of decentralized contributors to The Graph Network, grant applicants are encouraged to think about how their ideas can be utilized by the community or for the overall betterment of the protocol. The most successful grants are ones that receive support and feedback across The Graph Forum or other social channels. Thoughtful activity across these channels help constitute a stronger application and, ultimately, grantee success.

If you did not receive a grant in any of the past waves, don’t despair! There are no restrictions on re-submitting applications or how many times you can apply. However, when submitting your application, be sure to include as much detail as possible. Additional context helps make for a smoother review process.

Learn more about the Grants Program Recipients, core protocol development opportunities, and check out the continuous RFPs posted regularly.

Several focus areas have been identified as high-priority for more contributions in The Graph ecosystem:

• Firehose instrumentation for multi-chain
• Substreams and substreams tooling (eg.improved DevEx, testing, benchmarking and debugging tools)
• Multi-blockchain docs and tooling (eg. subgraphs across chains)
• Contributions to GIPs (protocol development and economics)
• Zero-knowledge proof Peer Review - SNARK Force research
• Educational content & curriculums for subgraphs & web3 development
• Community grants at the Graph AdvocatesDAO
• Migration bounties and grants (to the dapps/devs) at the SubgraphDAO

While the grants process currently includes many Domain Experts, the Foundation is also exploring ways to enable more direct community participation in funding decision-making. Stay in touch on the Forum or Discord if you have ideas or want to get more involved with the grants process.

Besides applying for a grant, there are many additional ways to get involved with The Graph Network. You can become a Delegator, Indexer, Curator, build subgraphs, vote on upcoming governance proposals, apply to Graph Advocates, or join SubgraphDAO. The options are vast and diverse. If there are any projects you admire in the web3 space that are not using subgraphs, we encourage you to educate them about subgraphs.

How to further participate in The Graph ecosystem

Feedback for tooling recommendations, useful dapps and gaps in subgraphs across the decentralized web is always highly appreciated. If you have any other ideas, feel free to post on The Graph Forum to share and stay up to date with highlights by following @GraphGrants on Twitter.

Make sure to also join the monthly Core Dev calls on the first Tuesday of each month and tune into Indexer Office Hours weekly in the Discord. Status updates regarding the R&D Roadmap will be shared across the community. More information can also be found on The Graph Forum.

The Graph Foundation believes in showcasing all the amazing work grantees put forth to contribute to the ecosystem. If you’ve completed your grant, don’t forget to message the Foundation team for cross-promotion and amplification around your project!

The Graph Foundation looks forward to reviewing your innovative ideas.

About The Graph

The Graph is the indexing and query layer of web3. Developers build and publish open APIs, called subgraphs, that applications can query using GraphQL. The Graph currently supports indexing data from over 39 different networks including Ethereum, NEAR, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, Avalanche, Celo, Fantom, Moonbeam, IPFS, Cosmos Hub and PoA with more networks coming soon. To date, 63,000+ subgraphs have been deployed on the hosted service. Tens of thousands of developers use The Graph for applications such as Uniswap, Synthetix, KnownOrigin, Art Blocks, Gnosis, Balancer, Livepeer, DAOstack, Audius, Decentraland, and many others.

The Graph Network’s self service experience for developers launched in July 2021; since then over 500 subgraphs have migrated to the Network, with 180+ Indexers serving subgraph queries, 9,300+ Delegators, and 2,400+ Curators to date. More than 4 million GRT has been signaled to date with an average of 15K GRT per subgraph.

If you are a developer building an application or web3 application, you can use subgraphs for indexing and querying data from blockchains. The Graph allows applications to efficiently and performantly present data in a UI and allows other developers to use your subgraph too! You can deploy a subgraph to the network using the newly launched Subgraph Studio or query existing subgraphs that are in the Graph Explorer. The Graph would love to welcome you to be Indexers, Curators and/or Delegators on The Graph’s mainnet. Join The Graph community by introducing yourself in The Graph Discord for technical discussions, join The Graph’s Telegram chat, and follow The Graph on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and Medium! The Graph’s developers and members of the community are always eager to chat with you, and The Graph ecosystem has a growing community of developers who support each other.

The Graph Foundation oversees The Graph Network. The Graph Foundation is overseen by the Technical Council. Edge & Node, StreamingFast, Figment, Semiotic, The Guild, Messari and GraphOps are seven of the many organizations within The Graph ecosystem.