The Graph Network launched its mainnet on Dec. 17, allowing developers to easily search, index, utilise and publish information from public blockchains.

This is fabricated possible through a global and open network of Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, called subgraphs. These form the basis of many of today's virtually pop decentralized applications.

The transparency of public blockchains is often lauded, but even though they incorporate a wealth of useful data, querying them for data is not particularly easy. The Graph's concern evolution lead Tegan Kline describes it as, "kind of like the web without Google."

1 may think why this is necessary. Later on all, there are plenty of belittling tools out there already which can pull useful information from blockchain information.

But these applications generally piece of work in a centralized way, and likely took months of evolution work to build. The Graph sees itself non as a competitor, but every bit a facilitator to these tools. Kline told Cointelegraph:

"The Graph is not an analytics company. We expect analytics companies to spin upward on The Graph, every bit The Graph allows them to easily pull information from the blockchain. You can think of The Graph as an open up data layer on top of the blockchain."

Anybody tin can create and publish their own API for use by the community, receiving a portion of the fees when that subgraph is queried. All query fees and rewards are made in Graph Tokens (GRT) which have also gone alive with the mainnet.

Some of the projects that have been using The Graph in its pre-mainnet "hosted" form include Uniswap, Aave, Synthetix, CoinMarketCap, Chainlink and CoinGecko.

In fact, the 3800+ subgraphs currently deployed include 21 of the top 25 DeFi apps. UniSwap founder Hayden Adams explained the appeal of using the project:

"The Graph has done great work so far in making smart contract data like shooting fish in a barrel to monitor and utilise. The design of the new organization will attract more than developers to build their own subgraphs, leading to better access to data. Once we know more, we tin build improve."