The Graph launched its mainnet a few days ago. This is a huge achievement for a project that has been working behind the scenes for over three years.

Now that The Graph is live, I want to take a step back and see how The Graph protocol and subgraphs will evolve in the future.

When talking about the future of The Graph, we cannot ignore the impact of the Web 3 revolution.

Web 3 at this point is not about technology, or performance. If you compare today's Web 3 apps to Web 2, they are slower and more complex to use than existing Web 2 apps.

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The Graph and Web 3

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The Graph Basics © The Graph

Web 3 builds its promise around 5 key elements.

1. identity control. Own your identity, data and reputation

2. Interoperability: Seamless integration between different dApps built on different chains.

3. reliability. Public infrastructure in operation with close to 100% availability.

4. trust. Built on Smart Contracts and Digital Agreements

5. safety. Security and Privacy

The Graph today is building the first step in actually realizing the promise of Web 3 by querying and indexing blockchain data. It needs to further develop its capabilities by adding layers of reliability and security to the blockchain’s indexed data.

What the Web 3 protocol stack looks like today, The Graph is part of the protocol layer that helps index and query valuable data from the blockchain.

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Web 3 protocol stack (© Coinbase blog), including The Graph

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Data usage: are you ready?

Graph is a data indexing protocol, which may develop into a data indexing and quality control protocol in the future.

In the world of Web 2, data quality is done through big data third parties, such as master data management (MDM), which stores what we call"golden record", and share it with everyone in the system who needs it. The 'golden record' is generally established with the help of external and internal references. This is of course not a suitable pattern for Web3 as MDM is a purely centralized tool, but this should give us some ideas/hints where we can go from here and build data quality protocols in a decentralized manner.

The Graph can develop in another dimension in the future, which is to support the diversification of networks and blockchains. Of course, Ethereum is the king today, and the first step in building The Graph with ETH is completely reasonable. Still, I don't believe"winner takes all", tomorrow, we will have a multi-chain ecosystem composed of different dominant layer-1 blockchains.

DeFI is one example of a successful decentralized application on Ethereum, but there are many more. A bridge has already been deployed between DeFi and privacy blockchain capabilities such as Oasis. More dApps are even built on Oasis, such as Insure.Network in the insurance field.

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Integrate the short/medium term development of the first layer of The Graph

We can even think of different scenarios for the long term, one of which might be like we can hear some people say today:"The Graph is the Google of blockchain"image description

Short/Medium and Long Term Views on Mass Adoption of The Graph

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The future of The Graph is bright, even if we are just beginning the Web3 journey. The use of blockchain data is just beginning. Data quality and control will be a key topic in the next few years, and many things still need to be defined. As a central part of manipulating blockchain data, The Graph already has all the keys to make a difference.