The Graph

Following the launch of its mainnet in December 2020, the native token of The Graph’s price spiked to an all-time high of $2.84 in February 2021. GRT trended gradually downward over the following months, hitting a low of $0.43 in late June.

The Graph’s price then struggled to retain its previous highs over subsequent months, fluctuating in the $0.60-$1.10 range throughout the remainder of the summer and into the fall.

GRT follows the work token model, meaning that it lets network users earn GRT in proportion to their work on the platform or the amount of GRT they stake. At the time of the mainnet launch of The Graph, 10 billion GRT were in circulation. From 10 billion, new tokens are issued through indexing rewards at a rate of 3% annually (subject to independent technical governance). Token burns are also subject to technical governance, but are expected to be around 1% of query fees and all deposit taxes.

GRT’s tokenomics system is developed through the work of its network participants. There are four main positions for users to participate in The Graph network:

• Indexers: Indexers operate nodes on The Graph Network. Indexers are required to stake GRT in order to operate a node and provide indexing and query services. For their positive contribution to The Graph network, indexers receive GRT through query fees and indexer rewards.
• Curators: Curators are users who either develop subgraphs, consume data or signal to indexers which application programming interfaces (APIs) should be indexed by The Graph.
• Delegators: Delegators help secure the network but do not run their own Graph node. Rather, delegators contribute by delegating GRT to Indexers and share a portion of the Indexer’s GRT from query fees and indexing rewards.
• Consumers: Consumers are the end users of The Graph who pay query fees to the indexers, curators and delegators. Consumers will pay for query fees with “gateways,” or wallets that will be built on top of open-source contracts in The Graph Network.