On Aug 03, Sam Zou and James Bayly joined PolkaWarriors AMA to introduce SubQuery - A data-as-a-service provider that aims to transform and Query the world’s data for Web3 future. During the AMA, their team has received a lot of interesting questions from the community.

SubQuery is a data-as-a-service provider that aggregates and organises data from Polkadot and Substrate projects, serving up well-structured data for developers to use for a wide array of projects. It operates between the layer-1 blockchains (Acala etc) and decentralised apps (dApps). This service allows dApp developers to focus on their core use case and front-end, without needing to waste time on building a custom backend for data processing.

SubQuery allows every Substrate/Polkadot team to process and query their data. The project is inspired by the growth of data protocols serving the application layer and its aim is to help Polkadot/Substrate projects build better dApps by allowing anyone to reliably find and consume data faster.

Below is a summary of the outstanding questions and answers from the AMA session.

1. I see your project SubQuery developing many products! This is an advantage of being able to meet most of the user's needs! However, does developing multiple products make it difficult to manage? How do you guarantee the quality of all the products in SubQuery?

James:

SubQuery only launched in February this year, and since then we’ve been working extremely hard. From day one we’ve focused on building a product that has market fit, and that has real use cases. It may look like we have many products now, but they all work together to provide a better service to our customers.

Firstly, we have an open source SDK. This SDK allows users to generate their own SubQuery Project, defining how the Indexer should traverse and aggregate their own protocol - see https://github.com/subquery/subql

We have also provided the community with help articles, walk-through guides, and other materials to help them get started with using SubQuery to unlock data for their use cases - it means every user can get started today by themselves. - take a look! https://doc.subquery.network/

We also provide a managed service, so instead of running your own indexer infrastructure (which is time consuming and expensive), we can run it for you in our cloud infrastructure. It means users can have a running SubQuery project in only hours.

Has anyone run a production server here? It's stressful!

Lastly, when you go to the SubQuery website, you’ll find our SubQuery Explorer which allows you to browse through all the existing public SubQuery Projects that we host for free. We host them for free only if they remain public, meaning that everyone can see, learn, and be inspired by them. Take a look https://explorer.subquery.network/

It means if you want to build a new application you might find a working example from someone else out there. You can take their code, expand it for your own use case, and control your future. But you get a working starting point that makes it so much easier to get started.

Our team is one of the best in the industry, and we don’t get distracted by things easily - we’re good at building tools for other developers because we are developers - you can expect us to keep building and delivering new features for a long time.

How do we guarantee quality?? Hard work by a top team!

2. Partners are very important for every project today. May I know which partners you have now? and which partners in the future you will be heading to?

Sam:

SubQuery is being used today by huge customers e.g Acala, Moonbeam, Bifrost, etc.

For example, Kurara, Acala's canary net in Kusama, is using SubQuery Data in their dApp - all the data that you see in Karura’s application is provided by a SubQuery project.

We are actually working closely with Fearless Wallet - one of the leading Polkadot wallets,

They are adapting their wallet to use data for SubQuery for staking revenue and others, because they can get data from SubQuery faster and in a more elegant way than if they went directly to the chain, saving lots of their development time and maintaince,

We've also got many NFT platforms, and chain exploreres who want fast access to data from Polkadot and Kusama (or their own chains). we're scaling our platform to support them all and be as fast as possible for their applications.

If a cusotmer wants to build a user friendly application - they should use SubQuery.

SubQuery is so easy to use that eveyr new team buildingan applicaiton will save hours of development and devops time with SubQuery, that's why all top polkadot eco parachains teams are using us, e.

3. Which market are you focusing on? How do you rate the Asia market? Do you have any plans to develop in the Asia market?

James:

Asia is becoming a centre of Polkadot and blockchain development in the world. That’s why Sam and I are talking to you all today - Vietnam, and the rest of Asia is that important to us.

Some of the teams in Vietnam and the rest of Asia are building incredible things, and as a service provider for blockchain teams, we want to help you achieve your goals faster!

Another thing is that we're building a bigger local community - you can join our ambassador program to be a part of our journey! https://subquery.medium.com/introducing-the-subquery-ambassador-program-aa82613ab804

4. What is the main goal that SubQuery wants to achieve this year? What will SubQuery look like after 2021? Can you explain the future the group describes?

Sam:

By the end of the year, we hope that SubQuery is going to be powering all the top projects on Polkadot or Substrate, our data services will be the fastest and most reliable out there. We’re going to keep things open, so anyone (from the biggest company to a single developer in Hanoi) can build and publish their own SubQuery for their own app.

We do believe that a healthy decentralisation future requires multiple data service providers, that’s why we’re going to decentralise the SubQuery Network.

In order to ensure no single point of failure for SubQuery, and to make sure that the community can participate in our success, we’re going to move to a globally distributed decentralised network of participants organising blockchain data. At the end of the year, we plan to be far down the road to true decentralization and tokenization of the SubQuery Network.

All will happen very soon,

5. I read on your website that some of the services SubQuery will offer will be free. So, will you have paid products? How will you generate income to finance your development process that will take years, do you have sufficient financial resources planning for this?

James:

SubQuery is currently open source, and will always be - anyone is free to use SubQuery themselves!

But running infrastructure is hard and takes a lot of time, so we provide a managed service for SubQuery. This is currently free for open source projects, but we expect to bring on some larger enterprise customers. Those customers will rely on us to run their SubQuery projects and so we may have revenue arrangements with large volume enterprise customers

The future SubQuery network is also designed to incentivize and tokenize our ecosystem with the SQT token - this is the main way we expect to make SubQuery profitable, with the rewards earned through our token economy.

By the way, have you seen our whitepaper

https://static.subquery.network/whitepaper.pdf

There's also this summary! https://subquery.medium.com/the-subquery-network-a-summary-46cde0acb010

6. Why did you choose the Polkadot network? SubQuery is known as “The Graph on Polkadot”. So what are the similarities and differences between SubQuery and The Graph?

Sam:

SubQuery is native to Polkadot and Substrate - it’s been our home and we know all the teams here.

The comparison to the Graph is correct, but it’s not really a fair comparison. SubQuery is dedicated to Polkadot (which is far younger than Ethereum) and we've only been around for ~6mo compared to over 2.5yrs.

Our competitive advantages over The Graph are:

Simplicity: We focus on helping developers create their own SubQuery Projects easily, and we’ve reduced the tokenomics complexity to improve network participation and make rewards easier to predict

Indexer/Delegation imbalance: Fairer and simpler rules both parties

Market signalling: With fixed price purchase orders instead of curators

Incentivising for performance: Indexer routing considers performance and latency

A focus on Substrate/Polkadot: As the market leader in Polkadot, we’ll dominate our ecosystem and support any Substrate chain

James has actually made a very simple video about this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjs0Gk1e7sw

We think there's plenty of space in our industry for multiple data providers so we look forward to working alongside The Graph and other data providers.

7. Wouldn't you have a problem with scalability? I mean, for your SQT to function properly, you need a large number of nodes to make as many sites on the network available as possible. How will it be solved?

James:

Scalability? We love scale!

We’re not concerned about scalability - the global market for data is huge. Look how big the big data players (like Google) in the centralised world are!

The SubQuery network doesn't require a large amount of nodes in the network, it would still work with a few indexers and different consumers as long as the number of requests are large. We’re currently doing millions of requests each day, we plan to grow that to billions each day!

We want as many small nodes running in the network as possible, and our intelligent indexer routing encourages that. We are building a tokenomics that rewards smaller indexers that are providing data closer to their users over bigger centralised ones.

Think of SubQuery like a content delivery network (CDN) - For example, from where I am in Auckland to Tokyo it takes 700ms for my request to SubQuery. If that goes to Sydney instead it’s only 300 ms. Much faster!

That's what we want SubQuery to be like

8. Many crypto projects have built their own dApp for staking. Is SubQuery also planning for making a dApp to stake $SQT?

Sam:

SubQuery probably won't be building dApps ourselves - we provide the tools to make building dApps easier for others.

I think the idea of building a dApp to view delegation staking rewards of SQT is a great idea - when we fully decentralised we plan to start a grants program that would reward builders of dApps just like this!

Whoever interesting of building such, welcome to contact us,

In the live questions section, Sam and James did answer several short questions from the PolkaWarriors community.

1. How do you think SubQuery is helping financial institutions reap the benefits that DeFi has to offer?

James:

Definitely, we're helping other teams like Acala and Bifrost with their data, and will work with dApp developers to make use of their data!

Our customers might be anyone anyone - from the biggest financial institution to a single developer in Hanoi.

2. Too many projects promise magic but never release any working product or prove any revenue, Within a short/long time of release. Is your project also like this? If not can u tell us, What makes your project different from other projects?

James:

Just take a look at the number of customers we are currently helping in production, and how much interest there is with builders in our ecosystem - we're not here to just talk, we are here to build and release!

3. I am an EXPERIENCED DEVELOPER AND ETHICAL HACKER, do you have plans for HACKATHON so as to check the security of your ecosystem periodically and also invite developers to build?

Sam:

Yes, we are working closely with our partners for Hackathon, keeps an eyes in our social media and it will happen soon

4. While you build your project, do you take into account community feedback and demands?

James:

We talk to customers every week, so when we build our product we build it right. In tech there is a concept called Product Market Fit - we aim to have it!

5. I have a question regarding Subquery token. Will it be on ERC20 first and later on polkadot, or do you plan to launch straight on Polkadot?

Sam:

We are planning to launch straight on Polkadot, the plan is that we will be working closely with the Acala team to tokenize SubQuery in the Acala ecosystem first.

6. Subquery is basically a native Polkadot protocol - why did you choose to base on Polkadot? Any benefits on this for the project and its users?

James:

Polkadot’s unique architecture means that we can focus on one network and then be able to support multiple current and future chains automatically. By putting in this effort now, even as Polkadot is still under development, we will be there ready to help the next generation of blockchain developers create the next big dApp.

7. How can users stay updated with this project? Are there channels, including local communities where users can get the latest updates?

James:

Take a look at the social media links on the bottom of our website https://subquery.network/

8. How do you intend to attract community members to SQT? How do you intend to gain more community support? How strong is your community support?

James:

Very strong, we haven't been focusing on this recently but now we are! We've just opened up our ambassador program and hired some more business development. Times like right now show how strong our community is!

9. Do you have AUDIT certificates, or are you working to AUDIT your project, to make it more secure and reliable?

Sam:

Yes, we've engaged with Auditor to audit our SC code

10. First impressions of your project are actually a big deal: You must aim to give out the best possible outcome. I have to admit, I didn't find much information about you. Is it true that you don't have a TG group? I saw your channel but not a group.. Why?

James:

Initially we had a lot of scammer activity on Telegram - but keep an eye out and we might have a group running soon. We're mostly on Discord.

11. What is biggest focus for SQT at the moment and what is the number #1 priority for the team in the next 6 months??

James:

Build the SubQuery Network!

12. Are developing countries also a market for SubQuery?

James:

Absolutely!

13. NFT is getting more popular nowadays. It looks like NFT has a bright future. So do you guys have any plan to include NFT to your project?

James:

We support many NFT projects like KodaDot and Secret NFT

14. What are the use cases of your token, and how are we as users motivated to buy and hold long term? Will new use cases come along time?

James:

The SQT Token will be used to exchanged for data from the SubQuery Network

15. As an individual user ,In what ways can I contribute to the development of SQT ? Do you have Ambassador programs and what are its benefits?

Sam:

yes, we have Ambassador program, you can sign up here, https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdxVAkAs4Gd5k1YoDk_C_ecQlWPiR2xFtnyf4pjHBHHwACFfA/viewform

16. Do you have any YouTube channel or website for this project?From where we can learn something?

James:

https://subquery.network/ and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi1a6NUUjegcLHDFLr7CqLw

17. Every industry is sadly affected by the atrocious situation of the COVID-19 outbreak. Does it affect the growth of the SubQuery project? What are your plans to turn challenges into opportunities for brand development?

James:

We're lucky that our team is safe and healthy - COVID 19 makes it harder for us to travel but we can still talk to you all!

Read more about SubQuery at: http://dotmarketcap.com/blog-detail/10/subquery-transform-and-query-the-worlds-data-for-a-web3-future

About SubQuery Network

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