The Graph Protocol is evolving with Horizon, a major upgrade that transforms the protocol into a more flexible and modular data services platform. While The Graph's core mission of organizing the world's public data remains unchanged, Horizon introduces a new architecture that enables permissionless innovation and improved economic mechanisms.
This upgrade represents the next evolution of The Graph, making it more composable, efficient, and capable of supporting various types of data services beyond just subgraphs.
The Graph Protocol as originally designed and launched back in 2021 is comprised of three distinct parts:
The protocol achieves this goals very well however it was designed specifically with the subgraph use case in mind. This resulted in those three components being very tightly coupled, making changes to the protocol hard to do and risky, and also not providing enough flexibility to support other use cases.
Graph Horizon’s main goal is to transform The Graph into a protocol capable of serving a multitude of data services, not just subgraphs. It achieves this by extracting the core functionality into primitives that can be reused by arbitrary data service implementations:
These primitives can be permissionlessly composed by developers by means of the Data Service Framework.
Horizon introduces a modular Data Service Framework that allows different types of data services to be built on top of The Graph's core staking and payments infrastructure.
The SubgraphService is the first and currently only data service implementation, supporting the existing functionality of indexing subgraphs and serving queries. This modular approach means that in the future, other data services could be added to support different use cases like SQL queries, data streams, or other data delivery mechanisms. A key benefit of Horizon is that new data services can be developed and deployed permissionlessly with minimal cost and development time, as they can leverage the existing staking and payments infrastructure.