The Graph launches hosted service for indexing data from Ethereum and IPFS

The Graph, a decentralized protocol for indexing and querying data from blockchains, has now launched its flagship hosted service and graph explorer for indexing data from the Ethereum blockchain and IPFS.

In addition, the company announced last Friday that it has raised $2.4 million in a seed round led by Multicoin Capital to finance their mission of building a fully decentralized indexing layer for Web3 applications. Additional investors included: Compound VC, CoinFund, DTC, Kilowatt, Reciprocal Ventures, SPC, and others.

The Graph is a query layer for blockchains, initially focused on Ethereum.

Query functionality is a critical piece of development infrastructure. Prior to The Graph, developers had to build homegrown, centralized indexing servers to serve up data for decentralized applications (dApps). This approach takes time, is capital-intensive, and re-introduces centralization, defeating the purpose of the dApp. The new hosted service by The Graph enables developers to quickly index data from smart contracts, unlocking rich new data sources to power dApps. The company plans to offer both centralized and decentralized services in 2019.

During a research presentation, a spokesperson also revealed details about the project’s decentralized network design for the first time and shared its multi-step roadmap for decentralizing the protocol.

In conjunction with the launch of the service, the project team also announced seven launch partners: Dharma, Compound, Uniswap, ENS, Origin, Decentraland, and Livepeer. All seven protocols are now available on The Graph for third-party developers to access.

With these announcements, the development community now has a new way to access organized data from Ethereum and IPFS. Moving forward, The Graph will onboard additional protocols to make even more data available to developers wanting to build dApps powered by blockchain data.