The Graph Grants $12.5M in ‘First-Ever’ Effort To Drive Web3 Standards

Messari, which already has 20 subgraphs within the ecosystem to date, said it wants to add a further 200, focusing on Web3 protocols

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  • Messari has won a $12.5 million developer grant from The Graph Foundation to further its efforts within the ecosystem
  • The crypto intelligence platform said it will use the grant to grow resources and continue driving toward its mission of open data

Crypto intelligence platform Messari said Thursday it has become the inaugural winner of a $12.5 million core developer grant from The Graph Foundation, earmarked for furthering data standards in Web3.

Messari will continue working on improving those standards by dedicating resources to subgraph development, of which it has already completed 20, the company said in a statement.

The Graph is a protocol for building decentralized applications on Ethereum, as well as indexing and querying data from various blockchains. It is considered by some to be a critical layer of Web3 development, supporting 34 different networks including Ethereum, Near, Arbitrum and Polygon.

Its foundation, meanwhile, is charged with stewarding the protocol’s ecosystem while shepherding developers and community members.

A subgraph defines which data The Graph will index from Ethereum and how the data will be stored, according to a blog post. The issue, The Graph says, is that data points are required to be collected across multiple protocols and often face a lack of standardization, proving cumbersome and inefficient.

Two protocols that share many similarities, for example, AAVE and Compound, may have significantly different application programming interfaces. The Graph protocol lets developers bootstrap, what are termed subgraphs, to their existing project’s smart contracts to query blockchain data quickly.

Messari said the grant will help it continue driving open-source data standards and “high-quality” subgraph development within The Graph ecosystem. 

“We are proud to have been awarded the first-ever Core Subgraph Developer grant by The Graph Foundation,” Messari CEO Ryan Selkis said.

“We share The Graph community’s belief that structured on-chain data should be accessible to everyone, not just enterprise data consumers.”

Messari also said it plans to build another 200 subgraphs for Web3 protocols and has begun creating standards and DeFi working groups to share best practices with other DeFi applications.


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