Chainstack awarded a $60K grant for Kubernetes automation from The Graph Foundation

We are thrilled to announce that we have received a $60K grant from The Graph Foundation Grants program for Kubernetes automation, which will contribute to the growth of the ecosystem by radically simplifying the deployment of The Graph nodes and related infrastructure.

Chainstack and The Graph

The Graph is the indexing and query layer of the decentralized web. Developers build and publish open APIs, called subgraphs, that applications can query using GraphQL. The Graph currently supports indexing data from Ethereum, IPFS, and PoA with more networks coming soon. To date, over 8,000 subgraphs have been deployed by over 10,000 active developers for applications such as Uniswap, Synthetix, Aragon, Gnosis, Balancer, Livepeer, DAOstack, AAVE, Decentraland, and many others.

The Graph Network has been live for three months now with over 160 Indexers and 6,000 Delegators onboard. Over 2.7B GRT (27% of all GRT) has been staked and delegated by Indexers and Delegators, equating to $4.3 Billion TVL—a testament to The Graph’s community and the participation in the network.

Graph Node services that indexes Ethereum blockchain have been included in our Marketplace since 2020. The indexes (“subgraphs”) can then be queried with GraphQL API. Thanks to the grant received as part of the Wave 1 allocation, Chainstack will create a radically simple open-source Kubernetes automation setup.

What is The Graph Foundation Grants program?

The Graph Foundation Grants were introduced to steward The Graph ecosystem into the future by supporting the network participants and the community. Over the last three months, the Foundation has been focusing on creating a nurturing ecosystem and funding the most critical additions to the protocol and tooling, useful DApps and subgraphs, and expanding the community.

The Foundation’s role is intended as a facilitator, bringing together the best builders and resources to improve the protocol and grow the ecosystem. To date, ~$3M has been budgeted for the year for Ecosystem Contributors who are aligned with the protocol’s long-term success, divided into Foundation Operations ($400K+), Bounties & Audits ($500K+), Community & Development ($500K), and Research ($1.4M). In total, ~$2.6M have been allocated in Wave 1 grants.

Chainstack project for The Graph

The grant won by Chainstack, chosen among over 200 grant applications from more than 10 countries, responds to the call to develop and open-source standardized deployment tooling and best practices for The Graph nodes using Kubernetes.

Wave 1 applications were assessed based on their relative significance and urgency, expected impact and community feedback. Interviews were taken by over 15 Domain Experts from across the ecosystem who specialize in each grant category.

The Graph Foundation

Chainstack will develop, maintain and support automation to simplify the deployment of The Graph nodes and related infrastructures like IPFS/Ethereum nodes and PostgreSQL database.

The end goal is for anyone to be able to deploy The Graph toolkit in their own infrastructure in a matter of minutes and not hours or days. The automation will be developed for Kubernetes as the leading infrastructure orchestration platform which allows sophisticated deployment similar to The Graph.

Technical deliverables

Getting into more technical details, Chainstack will develop a Kubernetes setup that includes proper setup of the Indexer Agent and Indexer Service (decentralized network components) as well as Graph Node.

The Chainstack team will create Helm charts to perform the same infrastructure setup as their current Kubernetes manifest setup. This will provide another layer of abstraction and simplify the process to a few configuration lines and 1one or two commands. This set up will include PostgreSQL, IPFS node, index nodes, query nodes, and indexer components.

Chainstack will also create an automated deployment for other cloud providers and on-premises Kubernetes configurations in addition to Google Cloud for which it already has detailed instructions. This will likely be delivered as a set of Terraform scripts with detailed documentation and potentially a CLI to control them.

A new powerhouse for the growth of Web3

Our mission is to make blockchain network deployment and management radically simple, something that will be key to succeed in widening adoption and development for the Web3. In line with The Graph Foundation’s goal, easy-to-use and more affordable infrastructure will allow for blockchain data to be accessed by more builders and to be used to create better applications. Thanks to this grant, Chainstack becomes a new powerhouse for the growth of The Graph and the Web3 community as a whole.

Connect with the community

• To learn more about Chainstack, visit our Knowledge Center or join our Discord server and Telegram group
• Sign up for a free Developer account, or explore the options offered by Growth or Business plans here.
• Take a look at our pricing tiers using a handy calculator to estimate usage and number of nodes.

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