The Graph (GRT)
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Price of The Graph today in real time
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Historical price evolution of The Graph
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The Graph emerges in 2017 when three developers with previous experience in developer tools startups identify a fundamental problem in the Ethereum ecosystem. Yaniv Tal, an electrical engineer who graduated from USC and former employee of MuleSoft —an API tools company that went public and was subsequently acquired by Salesforce—, together with Brandon Ramirez, also from MuleSoft as a researcher, and Jannis Pohlmann as tech lead, begin to explore the technical limitations of Ethereum and detect the absence of an efficient and decentralised way to index and query blockchain data for decentralised applications.
On 5th June 2018, the public launch of The Graph takes place, followed in January 2019 by the first Graph Day held in San Francisco, where Graph Explorer and the Hosted Service are presented, a centralised service designed as a bootstrap tool for the ecosystem. During this initial stage, the protocol establishes partnerships with prominent projects from the DeFi and Web3 space, including Dharma, Compound, Uniswap, Ethereum Name Service, Origin Protocol, Decentraland and Livepeer.
In October 2020, The Graph executes its public sale of the GRT token with participation from users in 99 countries, excluding the United States. The total fundraising up to that date reaches approximately 25 million dollars, with backing from institutional investors such as Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Multicoin Capital, Framework and ParaFi Capital. On 17th December 2020, The Graph mainnet launches, generating an increase of over 425% in the price of GRT during the following three days on Coinbase Pro. By that time, the protocol was already processing more than 10,000 million monthly queries, and Yaniv Tal assumes the role of CEO of Edge & Node, the founding team's development company.
On 18th February 2021, The Graph announces its expansion towards a multichain model with integration on Polkadot, NEAR, Solana and Celo, establishing itself as a universal indexing layer. In October 2023, it introduces the Upgrade Indexer, a tool designed to facilitate migration from the centralised Hosted Service towards the decentralised network. During 2024, the platform launches the Sunrise Upgrade Program, allocating up to 4 million GRT to support projects in their transition to the decentralised service, whilst expanding its coverage to new blockchains such as ApeChain, Metis, Sonic Labs and TRON, simultaneously improving support for Solana through Substreams.
In October 2025, Edge & Node presents ampersend, a payments platform for autonomous AI agents built on Coinbase's x402 protocol and Google's A2A framework, developed in collaboration with the Ethereum Foundation. In parallel, the integration of Chainlink CCIP is implemented to enable cross-chain transfers of GRT tokens, expanding the protocol's interoperable capabilities.
The Graph functions as a decentralised indexing protocol that organises and structures dispersed data on blockchains to make it easily queryable. Its fundamental unit is the subgraph, an open API that specifies which data to extract from particular smart contracts and how to organise it to respond to queries in GraphQL format. Developers create and deploy these subgraphs through Subgraph Studio, whilst decentralised applications and end users can query that structured data by paying in GRT tokens.
The protocol operates through four interconnected roles that maintain its decentralised functioning. Indexers are node operators that process and store blockchain data, serving queries in exchange for rewards, but must deposit GRT as collateral for their correct behaviour. Curators act as quality curators, signalling through GRT deposits which subgraphs they consider valuable for indexing, receiving in return a portion of the fees generated. Delegators participate in the protocol's security by delegating their GRT tokens to trusted Indexers without needing to operate technical infrastructure, whilst Consumers are the applications and users that pay GRT to access the indexed data.
The GRT token is an ERC-20 with an initial supply of 10,000 million units, which experiences an annual inflation of 3% intended to reward indexing and a deflation of 1% from the burning of tokens paid in fees, resulting in a net inflation of 2% per year. The ecosystem is complemented by Substreams, a high-speed real-time indexing solution designed for blockchains such as Solana and Sonic, expanding the protocol's capabilities beyond Ethereum.
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