The Graph - Revolutionize The Way To Access Blockchain Data
Nowadays, when we buy or borrow something, there is always someone in the middle to control our data. They can be the government, the bank or the regulator. However, with Blockchain, we will not need the intermediaries anymore since all transactions can take place automatically. This is the most basic explanation of the decentralized concept. So why is blockchain possible to realize this? That is because all data on blockchain cannot be changed. In fact, up until now we still have the "right data". However, there are often concerns about them being tampered with or overwritten. Blockchain has mechanisms for not accepting such inaccurate data. Among the large number of blockchain projects, The Graph is the most efficiently protocol that can help to index and query networks like IPFS and Ethereum. The Graph allow everybody to access to build and publish open APIs which is called Subgraph, hence, it bridges the gap between users and blockhchain projects in terms of data approaching.
Why The Graph/ Subgraph Is Needed?
In 2007, the first innovated iPhone was launched, revolutionize the whole mobile market. The reason behind this successful is its amazing UX (user experience), the phone was smoothly operate, everyone is so excited when they can scroll up, scroll down their music playlist, zoom in and zoom out their family's pictures easily and without any latency. That was impossible thing before iPhone. Therefore, we can see how important UX is for the successful of a product. Back to blockchain space, dApp used to be the revolutionary product that will change the internet. However, not many dApp can be successful and getting popular until now. One of the reason behind is that the current dApps are not very user-friendly, especially for non-crypto users. From the perspective view of users, they do not care whether the app is centralized or decentralized, more specifically, they only use fast, smooth and cheap app the same illustration of the successful of iPhone mentioned above. If any dApp cannot meet these requirements, it will surely go vaporware. For this reason, the appearance of subgraph will be extremely useful since developers can directly access accurate blockchain data, meaning that it can be used directly by dApp and developer will ensure trouble-free high performance of a dApp.
How Does Subgraph Can Help To Improve dApp?
In blockchain, the exported data need to go through many processes before being used such as filter, organizing and processing with the purpose of making sure that dApp can be used without any problems. Consequently, it is really time consuming process and even harder to retrieve correct information from blockchain data. Therefore, data from blockchain is rarely being used directly in dApp and developers do need time to completely build a dApp. For that reason, The Graph built a protocol that can learn how to index data from Ethereum blockchain, which rely on the description from subgraph (aka subgraph manifest). In simple term, subgraph will help to shorten the process, hence, give developers more time to perfect his/her product. In details, this process is even simpler since The Graph already provided The Graph Explorer, which users can easily find on The Graph's website, for users to query deployed subgraphs on the hosted service for their needs.
So the question here is how The Graph ensure all the input data is correct. In order to identify which is the correct data, Graph node will operate based on the participation of Indexers, Curators and Delegators. Particularly, Indexers will be responsible for index and query service while curators will organize the data and signal which subgraph is the most accuracy and helpful. The last participant which are delegators are non-tech people who just simply want to participate the network by delegating their GRT token in order to share the reward.
Besides, all data on subgraph will be encrypted, processed and stored on-chain. As a result, everyone can approach faster, more reliable and secure data through the open APIs.
Conclusion
Decentralized applications running on Blockchain are born every day. However, their practicality is still not much. The development of Blockchain applications is still facing many big problems. One of those is data accuracy and data accessing. However, with the help of state-of-the-art technology from The Graph, we will solve them sooner or later, bringing the world into a potential technological future ahead.
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Website: https://thegraph.com/
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