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The Supply-Side of Subgraph Gateway

The supply side of running a Gateway relates to everything facing the Indexers who actually serve a Gateway Operator’s query requests. Where the consumer side is about presenting a clean product, the supply side is about sourcing reliable data from a decentralized set of Indexers and paying them for it. This section covers how an Operator routes to Indexers, how they fund and manage payment, how they get Subgraphs synced in the first place, and how they track the quality of what the network serves them.

Indexers on The Graph Network

Indexers on The Graph Network are independent service providers who stake GRT, index Subgraphs, and serve queries in exchange for query fees and indexing rewards. They are not a Gateway’s employees and not under a Gateway’s control: any Indexer may be fast or slow, fresh or stale, available or down, at any moment. A Gateway’s job is to turn that shifting, independent supply into a dependable service for their consumers. That job breaks into four responsibilities.

A Gateway’s Four Supply-Side Responsibilities

  • Routing Queries to Indexers: For each query, a Gateway must choose which Indexers get it. This is where the Indexer Selection Algorithm turns quality, freshness, economic security, and cost into a routing decision, and where a Gateway Operator can block specific Indexers or bias toward preferred ones.

  • Managing Escrow: Indexers serve an Operator’s queries on the promise of payment, and that promise is backed by GRT held in Horizon escrow. Keeping escrow funded ahead of outstanding debt, and setting the fee an Operator is willing to pay per query, is what keeps Indexers serving them.

  • Incentivizing Syncs: A Gateway can only route to Subgraphs that some Indexer has actually synced. When a Subgraph their consumers need is under-indexed, a Gateway Operator has to incentivize Indexers to sync it, through curation signal where indexing rewards exist, and through Indexing Payments where they do not.

  • Tracking Quality of Service: To route well and to hold Indexers accountable, a Gateway Operator needs to measure what they actually deliver: success rates, latency, and freshness per Indexer and deployment. This is the data that feeds selection and informs blocking and sync decisions.

The supply side is where a Gateway’s payment machinery (Graph Tally) and selection machinery (Indexer Selection) do their work, and it is the harder half of running a Gateway, because it depends on cooperation from independent Indexers a Gateway does not control. Getting Indexers to accept an Operator’s Gateway at all is the onboarding wall described in Gateway-in-a-Box. Everything in this section assumes an Operator is working through or past it.