SQD

The exact CoinGecko asset uses Arbitrum 0x1337420dED5ADb9980CFc35f8f2B054ea86f8aB1, Base 0xd4554bea546efa83c1e6b389ecac40ea999b3e78 and BNB Chain 0xe50e3d1a46070444f44df911359033f2937fcc13. The reviewed Arbitrum balance was 1,327,250,415.287083277644283149 SQD across 16,829 holders, but a bridge representation is not a separate economic issuance.

Source-chain blocks are compressed into chunks and distributed to workers. Each worker queries local DuckDB data, signs its response, and Portal stitches responses into a stream with filtering, finality and reorg handling.

The current overview says 140+ networks although an older FAQ said 200+. This is a changing service-coverage metric, not a permanent protocol constant or evidence that each dataset has equal completeness.

Contract identity, chain-level supply and actual query coverage therefore need separate checks. One headline number cannot establish the scale or decentralization of the whole network.

A worker locks 100,000 SQD. Liveness pings, bytes scanned and returned, tenure and delegated stake feed its reward. A signed wrong answer can enter validation and slash the bond.

Delegators select workers and share rewards without running one. The whitepaper formula splits the delegated portion between operator and delegators, so headline APY is not a fixed token right; worker quality, commission, traffic and epoch rules matter.

Exiting is slow by design: about 100,000 Ethereum blocks, roughly 14 days, plus the remainder of an epoch. That delay keeps punishment collateral reachable but exposes both operator and delegator to price and lock risk.

A self-hosted Portal starts at 1,000,000 SQD. Amount and lock duration generate compute units, and each worker response consumes a CU. Heavy queries can involve many chunks and therefore many responses.

The whitepaper launch example of 12% virtual APY and 4,000 CU per SQD described capacity arithmetic, not a cash yield. Current Portal documentation instead says locked SQD generates 1–3 CU at each epoch start depending on lock period.

Managed Portal endpoints, private network and Cloud can be free or commercially funded through other arrangements. The token is essential for a self-hosted operator’s guaranteed capacity, not proof that every product request pays an onchain SQD fee.

Conflating these models turns token utility and company data services into one revenue story. Portal-lock economics depend jointly on query volume, CU rules and the SQD price.

Subsquid Labs GmbH is the sole data provider during bootstrap, according to its own whitepaper. It ingests chains, keeps S3-compatible persistence with IPFS backups, and initially can disable datasets until automatic subscription logic replaces that power.

Scheduler assigns chunks. Logs Collector stores signed operational logs. Reward Manager calculates an offchain epoch commitment and submits it for onchain claims. Contracts make records inspectable, but these specialized services remain availability and correctness dependencies.

The public and private networks also differ. Permissionless workers serve mainnet, while a production private network is operated by Subsquid Labs. Calling the whole SQD product stack uniformly decentralized would erase that boundary.

The Arbitrum SQD code is unusually narrow: the configured gateway alone can bridgeMint and bridgeBurn; ordinary users transfer and approve. There is no general owner mint, blacklist, pause or proxy upgrade in that token.

Network registries, staking, gateways, reward commitments, treasuries and dataset states live elsewhere. Token immutability does not tell us who can upgrade or administer each network contract. The reviewed governance prose promises participation but does not supply a complete binding execution map.

At TGE, 10% went to worker rewards, 28.1% reserved treasury and 5% liquid treasury; team and backer tranches used lockups and vesting. After the initial three-year fixed phase, governance may decide inflation. Supply policy therefore moves from scheduled treasury distribution toward an unresolved collective decision.

The documents describe holder participation but not a complete binding path from proposal creation through execution and admin-key replacement. Future supply and control combine verified code with procedures still left open.

SQD can be transferred, delegated, bonded or locked for Portal capacity. Those are concrete onchain uses. They do not create equity, a dividend, ownership of datasets or a contractual right to future roadmap delivery.

The whitepaper explicitly says its schedule and features are informational and remain at Subsquid Labs GmbH discretion. Service terms separately disclaim that digital assets available through services automatically convey an interest in SQD.

The honest decentralization story is progressive. Workers and claims are live on Arbitrum; upstream ingestion, dataset state and rewards still contain named actors. What matters is which dependency can be verified, challenged or replaced today—not the single label “decentralized.”