The price of Ethereum-based altcoin The Graph ($GRT) has surged more than 220% year-to-date, to the point that the cryptocurrency’s total market capitalization is now above the $1 billion mark.

The token’s price has been exploding since the beginning of February, and a report from crypto analytics firm Mssari has recently shown that $GRT’s revenue stream from query fees has started surging over growing adoption rates.

According to the report, total $GRT revenue from query fees rose 66% quarter-over-quarter and over 6,200% year-over-year. In U.S. dollar terms, revenue grew 5% quarter-over-quarter and 265% year-over-year. The firm forecasted that The Graph will keep on making development on its network easier through data-curating APIs called subgraphs.

Messari’s report adds that the rising volume may “attract more key participants to the protocol as it drives profitability for existing ones.” The cryptocurrency’s price has this year moved from around $0.055 to $0.18 at the time of writing.

GRTUSDT Chart via TradingView

According to Coinbase, The Graph is a protocol for “indexing and accessing blockchain data.” It “indexes blockchain records from networks like Ethereum in the same way that Google indexes the web.”

The protocol serves as a unifying and organizing entity for the decentralization movement by functioning as a global data layer that operates on top of blockchains and storage networks. Essentially, The Graph structures the data and facilitates its accessibility from the blockchain, serving as an integration layer for decentralized applications.

The Graph’s native cryptocurrency, $GRT, is an ERC20 token deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s primarily utilized for assigning resources within the network and allows participants to stake and use GRT to preserve the network’s economic stability and ensure the accuracy of queried data. Indexers, curators, and delegators who are actively contributing to the network can earn income from the network, depending on the extent of their involvement and GRT ownership.

The protocol was launched in July 2018 and has been offering a hosted service for Web3 and decentralized finance applications with over 2,900 subgraphs.

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