Just a few days after onboarding Semiotic AI, The Graph Foundation has awarded a $48 million grant to The Guild, roping in the leading developer group in open source GraphQL infrastructure (a data query language developed by Facebook) as another core developer in The Graph ecosystem.

Founded in 2018, The Graph indexes web3 blockchain data and makes it securely accessible to developers and users via a decentralized marketplace where queries are sent, prices for processing queries are negotiated, and micropayments are transferred. The firm already offers support to index data from 25 different blockchain protocols including Ethereum, NEAR, Arbitrium, Optimism, Polygon, Avalanche, Celo, Fantom, Moonbeam, IPFS, and PoA. All developers have to do is create open APIs called subgraphs to define which blockchain data has to be indexed by The Graph and how it has to be stored.

The solution is important for technical decision-makers as prior to this enterprise teams had to develop and operate proprietary indexing servers which required significant engineering and hardware resources and broke the important security properties required for decentralization.

The Guild to help with subgraph development

With the latest grant, set to span four years, The Graph will get The Guild’s help to accelerate the development of subgraphs and improve the blockchain indexing system. According to a statement, the group, which is a core contributor and leader of many open-source GraphQL projects, will collaborate with other developers in The Graph ecosystem and work towards improving features like subgraph composition, analytics, and mutations. It will also build out new subgraph standards, features, and The Graph Node’s querying capabilities, allowing developers to more quickly construct feature-rich apps using The Graph.

Eva Beylin, the director of The Graph, noted that the move means leading GraphQL developers will be focusing on building subgraphs to vastly improve functionality for dapp development that could catalyze overall web3 growth.

“The Guild’s experience innovating with GraphQL is unparalleled – they are the best-positioned team to contribute to open APIs for The Graph and to support the needs of web3 application developers,” Beylin added.

Notably, this is the fourth grant from The Graph since the launch of its main net in December 2020. Previously, the company had onboarded Semiotic AI, StreamingFast, and Edge & Node. The total funds allocated towards this end stand at $248 million.

“The Graph is really like the Google of blockchains. The Graph indexes all of the blockchain data and serves that data. So it’s how developers access data and serve it to their users, just like how Google set out to index the web back in the day. The Graph is doing that only for the blockchain data. And we believe that blockchains are the future of the Internet. So that will become all of the world’s data,” Tegan Kline, the cofounder of Edge & Node, told Venturebeat in a June 2021 interview.