The Graph (GRT)

The Graph (GRT) is the native token of The Graph, a decentralized protocol for indexing and querying blockchain data. Applications use it to look up information such as token balances, trades or NFT ownership without scanning the whole chain themselves. GRT is staked by the independent operators who serve that data, delegated by holders who back them, and used to pay for queries.

GRT is an ERC-20 token that was issued on the Ethereum Blockchain; most protocol activity has since moved to Arbitrum, a layer-2 network. The Graph is often described alongside oracle networks such as Chainlink, but the two do different jobs: an oracle brings outside data onto a blockchain, while The Graph organizes data that is already on-chain so it can be read quickly.

A blockchain records everything, but in the order it happened, like a shop's till roll printed over years. If you want to know every sale of one product, you would have to read the whole roll. The Graph works like a library catalogue for that till roll: specialists read the records once, file them by subject and then answer questions in seconds.

Developers describe which records they care about in a recipe called a subgraph. Operators called indexers follow the recipe, keep the catalogue up to date and charge a small fee each time an app asks a question. GRT is the token that pays those fees, and indexers must lock some up as a deposit, so they have something to lose if they serve wrong answers.

The project was conceived in 2017 by Yaniv Tal, Brandon Ramirez and Jannis Pohlmann, whose company later became Edge & Node. A hosted version of the service, run centrally by the team, ran for several years before the decentralized network existed and was quickly adopted by decentralized finance apps. GRT was sold to the public in October 2020 and the decentralized network launched on 17 December 2020, with an initial supply of 10 billion GRT. The Graph Foundation and several independent core developers now maintain the protocol.

Over the following years, subgraphs were moved from the hosted service to the decentralized network, and the hosted service was switched off on 12 June 2024. In December 2025 the Horizon upgrade went live on mainnet, turning the protocol from a single subgraph service into a framework on which several data services can share the same staking and payment system.

The network has four main roles, each tied to GRT:

• Indexers. Node operators stake GRT, index subgraphs and answer queries, earning query fees and newly issued indexing rewards. Staked GRT can be cut, or slashed, if they serve incorrect data.
• Delegators. Holders who do not run infrastructure can delegate GRT to an indexer and receive part of its rewards, similar to delegated staking on other networks.
• Curators. Developers and others signal which subgraphs are worth indexing by depositing GRT on them, and earn a share of those subgraphs' query fees.
• Developers and apps. They publish subgraphs and pay for queries, usually through a gateway that bills them in GRT or another currency.

Queries are written in GraphQL, a common API language, so a decentralized application can fetch data much as a website calls a web service.

GRT has no hard cap. New tokens are issued as indexing rewards at a rate set by governance, about 3 percent a year, while several mechanisms burn tokens. The best known is the protocol tax on query fees:

• $\text{Query fees}$ is the GRT paid by apps for data served in a period.
• $0.01$ is the 1 percent share destroyed by the protocol.

For example, if apps pay 2,000,000 GRT in query fees in a month, $0.01 \times 2{,}000{,}000 = 20{,}000$ GRT is burned and the rest is shared among indexers, delegators and curators. Curators also pay a 1 percent tax when they deposit signal. A 0.5 percent tax on delegations existed before Horizon and was removed with that upgrade. Because rewards are paid in new tokens, holders who neither stake nor delegate see their share of the supply shrink over time. Whether burning outweighs issuance depends on how much the network is used; see tokenomics.

GRT is traded on major exchanges and has not been the subject of a US enforcement action naming it a security. Exchanges that list it must still meet the licensing and anti-money-laundering rules that apply to any crypto asset, including MiCA in the European Union.

Critics argue that query fees have long been small compared with token issuance, so rewards depend heavily on inflation rather than paying customers. Others note that many apps still reach the network through a handful of gateways and that competing indexing services, including centralized data providers, offer similar products. As with any cryptocurrency, GRT's price is volatile.

• The Graph
• The Graph documentation