Multicoin Capital, an Austin, Texas-based “thesis-driven” crypto hedge fund that “invests long term” in various digital asset projects, has led a $2.5 million seed funding round in a firm that plans to make it easier to retrieve data from public blockchain platforms.
Need A Better Way To “Query Data Out Of The Ethereum Blockchain”
Receiving the multi-million dollar investment, The Graph, a US-based tech startup, is developing an open-source software solution that indexes blockchain data so that it may be accessed more quickly by individuals and organizations. At present, there’s a lot of useful information that resides on major blockchains, The Graph’s development team notes. However, they claim that there’s no proper database structure for easily collecting and utilizing data stored on blockchain platforms.
As explained in an official blog post by Multicoin Capital, centralized applications such as Etherscan and decentralized apps (dApps) like prediction markets platform, Augur “need to query data out of the Ethereum blockchain.” However, this is currently being done by using a “haphazard, fragile, proprietary, centralized indexing server”, according to Multicoin Capital co-founder, Kyle Samani.
Providing An Improved Blockchain Data Querying System
In order to provide a more effective set of tools to query data from blockchain networks, The Graph is reportedly building a standardized indexing system that can be used by everyone.
Commenting on the importance of creating an improved data retrieval system, Samani wrote:
Virtually everyone in the web3 development community has come to recognize how important and underserved this layer [data querying] of the web3 stack really is. The Graph has emerged as the market leader, with dozens of teams using the service in closed beta right now.
Notably, The Graph’s development team is building a new decentralized version of Facebook’s GraphQL software – which the social media company open-sourced in 2015. GraphQL is a data query and manipulation language for APIs. The software solution also has its own runtime environment for executing queries. In November 2018, the GraphQL project’s management responsibilities were transferred from Facebook over to the non-profit Linux Foundation.
Building Apps & Protocols For Web 3.0
Yaniv Tal, the project lead at Graph protocol, revealed that Compound VC, CoinFund, and Reciprocal Ventures also participated in the firm’s seed round. In an email sent to Coindesk, Tal wrote:
Web3 is an evolving platform that’s open, secure, stable, and verifiable but it’s still difficult to build usable applications with this nascent technology. The Graph … will enable developers to build the next wave of applications on a solid foundation.
Meanwhile, Samani, the managing partner at Multicoin Capital, believes that the smart contract-based dApp development market is growing steadily. Although he still expects Ethereum (ETH) to remain the dominant platform for launching initial coin offerings (ICOs), Kamani recently remarked that other promising projects such as DFINITY and Cosmos will help create a more balanced market moving forward.
Both DFINITY and Cosmos are working on developing various protocols for dApp development and blockchain interoperability.
