The Graph's unusual story is a planned demolition. Its centralized Hosted Service made subgraphs useful, then had to disappear for the protocol's premise to become true. GRT financed the independent replacement, while an Arbitrum migration and Horizon rewrite changed the rules beneath the same token.
The Graph began in 2018 with a practical observation: Ethereum could verify events yet could not answer application-shaped questions efficiently. Subgraphs let developers declare contracts, handlers and entities once, then query the derived data with GraphQL. The Hosted Service made this workflow easy and free, proving the product before a token-coordinated network existed.
Mainnet launched in December 2020, but thousands of subgraphs still depended on the Hosted Service. The announced shutdown slipped from a calendar deadline to chain-by-chain readiness because developers needed feature and reliability parity. On June 12, 2024, the service finally stopped. The delay is part of the achievement: decentralization arrived by replacing a working dependency, not by relabeling it.
Indexers bond capital and run infrastructure; Curators risk signal on subgraphs; Delegators choose an operator; consumers pay for data. New issuance rewards indexing while query and curation taxes plus penalties burn tokens. Horizon then removed the old delegation tax and made delegation service-specific. A holder receives none of these cash flows merely by owning GRT: each return is conditional on a protocol role and its rules.
Transfer tools moved stake, delegation, curation and subgraphs to Arbitrum during 2023, and all indexing rewards followed by June 28, 2024. Horizon later separated reusable staking and payment primitives from the Subgraph Service. The principal deployment is now cheaper to operate and open to independent Indexers, but its proxies, Controller, bridge and parameters remain governable. At its launch, the Council was described as a 6-of-10 multisig for upgrades and emergency actions. This review does not independently verify its current membership, signers or approval threshold; GRT ownership is economic participation, not a personal veto or corporate share.
The project frames reusable indexing manifests and GraphQL APIs as a shared data layer for decentralized applications.
A centrally operated free service lets developers deploy subgraphs while the permissionless network is still being built.
Independent Indexers, Curators and Delegators begin coordinating through the Ethereum protocol.
Participants can move stake, delegation, curation signal and subgraphs from Ethereum protocol contracts to Arbitrum One.
Official Graph subgraph traffic completes the move from the centralized scaffold to The Graph Network.
Reward issuance finishes its L2 transition; L1 protocol activity winds down while the token bridge remains.
Staking and payments become reusable primitives, Subgraph Service becomes the first live data service, and the legacy delegation tax disappears.
Last evidence review: 2026-09-05
The Graph is infrastructure for reading blockchains. A developer writes a subgraph manifest describing contracts, events and mappings; Graph Node converts that stream into structured entities and exposes them through GraphQL. Under Graph Horizon, the Subgraph Service is the first and currently only live data service built on modular staking and payment contracts.
GRT is the work and coordination token, not the indexed data itself. Indexers stake it while operating machines, Curators deposit it to signal useful subgraphs, Delegators assign it to an Indexer, and consumers ultimately fund query service. Those actions can earn protocol rewards or fee shares, but a wallet balance alone is not equity in The Graph Foundation or Edge & Node, does not guarantee revenue, and carries no documented redemption right against a treasury.
Blockchains preserve ordered state changes, but an application usually asks a different kind of question: every swap by one address, a protocol's daily volume, or the owners of matching NFTs. Reconstructing those answers from raw RPC calls forces each application to maintain archive access, ingestion, reorganization handling, storage and an API. The subgraph model made those instructions reusable.
The first successful answer was operationally centralized. The free Hosted Service let developers publish subgraphs and proved demand, while a single service remained a dependency. The Graph Network launched in December 2020 to create a paid market of independent Indexers. Migration took years rather than a switch: the Hosted Service finally stopped on June 12, 2024, after the decentralized network could support production traffic.
An Indexer runs Graph Node and related payment software, self-stakes at least 100,000 GRT under current documentation, selects deployments and submits Proofs of Indexing. Curators create signal on subgraphs to guide indexing and participate in query fees. Delegators increase an Indexer's productive stake and receive the portion of rewards and fees set by that Indexer, with a 28-day undelegation period under Horizon. These are exposed positions: Indexer stake can be slashed, delegation returns vary, and curation depends on query demand.
GRT began with 10 billion units and a target 3% annual issuance for indexing rewards. Burns offset part of issuance through taxes, fees and penalties. The rule set has changed: the former 0.5% delegation tax was removed permanently by Horizon, although an older official tokenomics overview still lists it. Current parameters should therefore be read from live Horizon documentation and contracts, not assumed from launch-era summaries.
The protocol now operates principally on Arbitrum One. The published deployment includes a Controller, GraphProxyAdmin, HorizonStaking, RewardsManager, payment escrow, token gateway and L2 GRT contract 0x9623063377AD1B27544C965cCd7342f7EA7e88C7. The Council can approve upgrades, parameter changes and emergency action. That governance makes repairs possible, while also placing material technical and monetary choices beyond an ordinary holder's unilateral control.
It is a versioned set of indexing instructions and mappings for selected blockchain data. Graph Node follows those instructions, stores derived entities and serves them through GraphQL; it is not a new blockchain or a copy of every chain.
No. Fee and reward participation requires a defined role such as indexing, delegation or curation. Outcomes depend on Indexer parameters, service activity, protocol rules and, for curation, demand for the chosen subgraph.
No under the live Horizon rules. The current delegation guide says it was permanently removed. An older tokenomics overview still displays the former tax, so its economics section should not be treated as wholly current.
The principal protocol deployment and indexing rewards moved to Arbitrum One, but the Ethereum GRT token and L1-L2 bridge remain operational. Users must verify the chain and contract because the addresses differ.
Community members can discuss GIPs and signal through governance processes, but binding upgrades and parameter or emergency actions are overseen by The Graph Council and its contract-control structure. Token ownership alone does not execute an upgrade.
The reviewed materials document transferable tokens and protocol participation functions. They do not establish automatic equity in an operating company or Foundation, guaranteed income, or redemption against treasury assets.
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