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The Graph's Quiet Takeover: How Blockchain's Indexing Giant Became the Data Layer for AI Agents

· 11 min read
Dora Noda
Dora Noda
Software Engineer

Somewhere between the trillion-query milestone and the 98.8% token price collapse lies the most paradoxical success story in all of Web3. The Graph — the decentralized protocol that indexes blockchain data so applications can actually find anything useful on-chain — now processes over 6.4 billion queries per quarter, powers 50,000+ active subgraphs across 40+ blockchains, and has quietly become the infrastructure backbone for a new class of user it never originally designed for: autonomous AI agents.

Yet GRT, its native token, hit an all-time low of $0.0352 in December 2025.

This is the story of how the "Google of blockchains" evolved from a niche Ethereum indexing tool into the largest DePIN token in its category — and why the gap between its network fundamentals and market valuation might be the most important signal in Web3 infrastructure today.

From Ethereum Indexer to Multi-Chain Data Marketplace​

When The Graph launched in 2020, its premise was elegantly simple: blockchain data is stored in a format that is terrible for application queries. Smart contracts emit events and store state in tries, but if you want to ask "show me all NFT transfers for this wallet in the last 30 days," you are on your own. The Graph solved this with Subgraphs — custom, open APIs that define how blockchain data should be indexed, structured, and served to applications.

The product-market fit was immediate. Within three years, The Graph had processed over a trillion queries. Uniswap, Aave, Synthetix, Decentraland, and hundreds of other protocols became dependent on subgraphs for their front-end data needs. By 2024, The Graph had completed its transition from a centralized hosted service to a fully decentralized network — a migration that most Web3 projects talk about but rarely execute.

But the real transformation began in 2025, when the protocol stopped being just about subgraphs.

The Numbers Tell the Story​

The Graph's query volume hit an all-time high of 6.49 billion queries in Q2 2025 — up 5.8% from the previous quarter's 6.14 billion. Even after a slight dip to 5.46 billion in Q3, the trajectory is clear: demand for decentralized blockchain data indexing is growing steadily, not spiking and crashing with speculative cycles.

The cross-chain distribution reveals where the growth is coming from. In Q3 2025, Base overtook Ethereum Mainnet for the first time as the largest query source, processing 1.11 billion queries (up 42.7% quarter-over-quarter). Ethereum Mainnet fell to 1.05 billion, while BNB Smart Chain claimed third place with 665.5 million queries.

Developers launched 1,673 new subgraphs in Q2 2025 — a 46.3% quarterly increase, the highest growth rate since The Graph's full migration to Arbitrum. Active subgraphs reached 15,087 by Q3. Delegators grew 22% year-to-date to over 167,000, with 9.5 billion GRT staked — representing 89% of the circulating supply.

These are not the metrics of a dying protocol. These are the metrics of infrastructure that the ecosystem cannot function without.

Horizon: The Upgrade That Changes Everything​

In December 2025, The Graph deployed Horizon — the most significant protocol upgrade since the network launched. Horizon transforms The Graph from a subgraph-specific indexing protocol into a modular, multi-service data platform.

The upgrade introduces three architectural innovations:

A core staking protocol that provides economic security for any data service. Previously, GRT staking was tied exclusively to subgraph indexing. Horizon decouples staking from any single service type, enabling the same economic security model to back substreams, token APIs, AI inference, and any future data service.

A unified payments system across all services. Query fees, streaming data payments, and API access costs now flow through a single payment layer. This eliminates the fragmentation that previously made it difficult for indexers to offer multiple data products.

A permissionless framework for building new data services. Anyone can now create a new data service on The Graph without rebuilding infrastructure from scratch. The protocol handles the economic incentives, payment routing, and verifiability layer.

The practical impact is that The Graph is no longer just an indexing protocol. It is a data marketplace — a decentralized platform where multiple types of blockchain data services compete for query volume, secured by the same GRT-based economic layer.

The 2026 roadmap extends this further with SQL-powered data engines for enterprise-grade analytics and AI-driven infrastructure for natural language queries and agentic systems.

The AI Agent Inflection Point​

The Graph's most consequential development may not be a protocol upgrade at all. It is the emergence of AI agents as a primary consumer of blockchain data.

A striking statistic from The Graph's Token API launch: 37% of new Token API users are AI agents, not human developers. These agents need real-time blockchain data — wallet balances, token transfers, transaction histories, pricing data — to execute autonomous on-chain strategies. And they need it indexed, structured, and served at machine speed.

The Graph has positioned itself at the center of this shift through several strategic moves:

ERC-8004: Digital Passports for AI Agents​

The Graph is maintaining dedicated ERC-8004 subgraphs across eight blockchains in partnership with Agent0, the project behind the standard. ERC-8004 establishes Identity, Reputation, and Validation registries for autonomous agents — essentially digital passports that track an agent's behavioral history and validation proofs for completed tasks.

An AI agent operating on Base can query another agent's reputation on Arbitrum through a single subgraph lookup — no multi-chain scanning required. The Graph's indexing layer makes the cross-chain agent reputation system actually queryable at scale.

x402: Micropayments for Machine-to-Machine Queries​

The x402 protocol, developed by Coinbase, enables agents to pay fractions of a cent for individual data queries or compute resources. This is critical because traditional payment infrastructure was not built for machines making thousands of micro-requests per minute.

Agents can now pay for subgraph queries using x402, with full gateway compatibility in development. If this model scales, The Graph becomes the monetization layer for machine-to-machine blockchain data transactions — a fundamentally different value proposition than serving human developers through web interfaces.

AI Inference and Agent Services​

The Graph has released two dedicated AI services: an Inference Service that enables indexers to provide GPU compute for running AI models, and an Agent Service that facilitates autonomous AI interactions with blockchain data. These services transform indexers from pure data providers into AI compute infrastructure operators.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) server introduces natural language query capabilities, enabling users and agents to retrieve wallet balances, NFT histories, and token prices across chains using conversational interfaces instead of GraphQL.

GRC-20: Knowledge Graphs for AI​

In 2025, The Graph introduced GRC-20, a knowledge graph standard for structured, interoperable data organization on-chain. Think of ERC-20 as the standard for fungible tokens; GRC-20 is the proposed standard for knowledge representation.

Knowledge graphs are particularly valuable for AI systems because they represent information as interconnected entities rather than flat tables — matching how AI models reason about relationships. The Geo Genesis application, launched in January 2025, lets communities curate and govern knowledge graphs that AI agents can consume.

The DePIN Paradox: Record Usage, Record-Low Token Price​

The Graph's DePIN story is defined by a stark contradiction: the protocol has never been more heavily used, yet its token has never been worth less.

GRT fell to $0.0352 in December 2025 — a 98.8% decline from its 2021 all-time high. The circulating market cap slipped to around $830 million. AI and big data tokens collectively lost $53 billion in 2025, and GRT dropped 82% despite processing 11.6 billion queries in the first half of the year alone.

The root cause is a revenue gap. In Q1 2025, total query fee revenue across subgraphs and substreams amounted to just $210,237 — covering barely 1.2% of the $9.8 million in indexing rewards distributed that quarter. Indexers overwhelmingly depend on inflationary token rewards, not organic fee revenue, to sustain operations.

The math is punishing: 3% annual inflation creates approximately 343 million new GRT tokens per year, while quarterly query fees generate roughly $100,000–$210,000. Fee revenue would need to grow at least 4x to begin offsetting dilution — and even that assumes staking reward rates remain constant.

There is a silver lining. Annualized inflation from new GRT issuance dropped sharply in Q2 2025, falling 179 basis points to 1.05% — the steepest reduction since the network launched. After nine quarters of declining indexer participation, active indexers grew 2.8% and allocated stake rose 5.3%, suggesting early signs of operational recovery.

But the fundamental question persists: can Horizon's multi-service architecture generate enough fee revenue to justify GRT's token economics?

Cross-Chain Expansion: From Ethereum to Everything​

The Graph's chain support has expanded aggressively beyond its Ethereum roots:

  • 40+ blockchains now indexed, including Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, Optimism, Avalanche, BNB Smart Chain, Celo, Soneium, and Ronin
  • Stellar and TRON added via Substreams and subgraph integrations in 2025
  • Chainlink CCIP integration enables secure cross-chain GRT transfers between Arbitrum, Base, and Avalanche, with Solana support in Phase 2
  • Cross-chain staking, delegation, and query fee payments are slated for Q1 2026

The CCIP integration matters beyond token portability. If developers can pay query fees and stake GRT from any supported chain, the friction of operating across multiple networks decreases substantially. An indexer on Arbitrum can serve queries for Solana data while receiving payments in GRT on Base — all through a single unified protocol.

The chain distribution data already shows this multi-chain strategy working. No single blockchain dominates query volume. The top four chains — Base, Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, and Arbitrum — each serve hundreds of millions to over a billion queries per quarter, with long-tail chains contributing meaningful volume.

What Comes Next: The Data Infrastructure Bet​

The Graph's thesis is that blockchain data infrastructure will follow the same trajectory as web data infrastructure — where the indexing and search layer eventually captures more value than the data sources themselves. Google does not create web content, but it captured the value of making content findable. The Graph is making the same bet for on-chain data.

The Horizon upgrade, AI agent integrations, and cross-chain expansion collectively move The Graph toward becoming a decentralized data marketplace where:

  • Subgraphs serve traditional dApp query needs
  • Substreams deliver real-time streaming data for DeFi protocols and trading systems
  • Token API provides ready-to-use token data for wallets and explorers
  • AI services offer inference and agent coordination for autonomous on-chain actors
  • Knowledge graphs (GRC-20) structure decentralized information for AI consumption

The competitive landscape is tightening. Chainlink, Ocean Protocol, and newer entrants like Ormi Labs are targeting pieces of the decentralized data stack. But The Graph's installed base — 50,000+ active subgraphs, 167,000+ delegators, and ecosystem integrations with virtually every major DeFi protocol — creates a moat that competitors cannot easily replicate.

The real test arrives in 2026. If Horizon's multi-service architecture drives fee revenue growth, if AI agent query volume scales to a meaningful percentage of total queries, and if cross-chain GRT utility via Chainlink CCIP generates sustained demand — the current token price may prove to be the most mispriced asset in DePIN.

If not, The Graph will remain the most widely used protocol in Web3 that nobody can figure out how to value.

Building on blockchain data infrastructure? BlockEden.xyz provides enterprise-grade node access and API services across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Solana, Sui, and 20+ networks — the same chains that The Graph indexes. Explore our API marketplace for reliable, low-latency blockchain connectivity.

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