The Graph ELI 5 version
If you are new to the crypto field welcome if you have been around for a while you would have seen a lot of dapps getting a lot of attention. Let me give a few examples which are famous
- Crypto Kitties
- Axie Infinity
- Yearn
These are some of the famous dapps now so lets consider you are in need to get the data from these dapps
It is quite easy when you are looking for data like say
what is the birth time of the kitty?
When was the stake started?
These are some straight forward questions what if I make it more complex something like this
What is the sum of all birth time of white cats?
What is overall APY for an address from 20 days after the stake started to till today?
If you give me all the data itself personally I feel it hard to calculate ROFL.
Imagine a backend developer writing this query and searching through the chain it will take forever don’t sweat the Graph is here to save you from this trouble.
What is the graph?
The graph is an indexing protocol where the query speed is increased with the help of subgraphs hosted and provided as an API.
So whenever someone needs the data they query through the API and have it right away
The language used to do the talking with the API is GraphQL. The GraphQL is an opensource language developed by Facebook and launched in 2015.
The higher-level architecture is as the below diagram:
source: graph docs
As you can see one will hit the Graph node and bam you will have your data which you will need now can you understand how big and important this can be in the blockchain industry.
There you go this is the simplest explanation of The Graph that you will need to start exploring about the project.
