The Graph provides blockchain data and receives query fees from demand-side users. Supply-side users also pay fees for delegating to a node, curating subgraphs, disputes and when slashing occurs (revenue). Indexers, delegators and curators perform indexing services for which they are compensated by The Graph (expenses).

The Graph is an indexing protocol built on Ethereum and other blockchains. The Graph was founded by Brandon Ramirez, Jannis Pohlmann, Yaniv Tal and launched in 2018.

GRT tokenholders own and govern the protocol. They currently take all of the total fees (revenue). The Graph’s investors include Multicoin Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Framework ventures, etc.

governance

github

twitter

discord

etherscan

website

Infrastructure

The Graph

# The Graph Earnings Methodology

## 1. Overview

The Graph earnings metric measures the protocol's daily net profit by calculating total revenue minus total expenses. This metric answers the question: "How much profit does The Graph protocol generate after accounting for all network incentives and operational costs?" The calculation follows a standard earnings formula where daily protocol revenues (from query fees, curation taxes, delegation taxes, and dispute penalties) are reduced by daily expenses (cost of revenue and token incentives paid to network participants).

## 2. Data sources

The calculation relies on these raw blockchain data sources:
- **Protocol event logs**: Parsed smart contract events from The Graph protocol contracts deployed on Ethereum, Arbitrum, and Polygon, including billing events, staking events, curation events, dispute management events, and rewards distribution events
- **Token transfer events**: Ethereum and Arbitrum `Transfer` event logs specifically for GRT token transfers to burn addresses (null and dead addresses)
- **End-of-day price feeds**: Daily USD price data for GRT tokens to enable currency conversion
- **Token metadata**: GRT token decimal configurations for proper amount scaling across different chains

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Revenue collection
- **Purpose**: Captures all protocol fees and penalties that generate revenue for The Graph protocol
- **Logic**: Extracts four distinct revenue streams from blockchain event logs. Query fees are captured from `Billing_TokensPulled_event` logs where users pay for data queries. Curation taxes are extracted from `Curation_Signalled_event` logs using the `curationTax` field when curators signal on subgraphs. Delegation taxes are calculated by matching `Staking_StakeDelegated_event` logs with corresponding GRT token transfers to burn addresses (null address and dead address) within the same transaction, using transaction hash and action sequence matching. Dispute fees combine accepted dispute penalties (slashed amount minus fisherman reward from matched `DisputeManager_DisputeAccepted_event` and `Staking_StakeSlashed_event` logs) with rejected dispute deposits (full deposit amount from `DisputeManager_DisputeRejected_event` logs). All events are filtered to exclude removed transactions and include a special hardcoded adjustment for Polygon migration date query fees
- **Key fields**: Revenue amounts come from `amount` (query fees), `curationTax` (curation fees), token burn `value` (delegation taxes), and calculated dispute penalties

### Component B: Expense collection - cost of revenue
- **Purpose**: Captures direct operational costs paid to network participants for providing services
- **Logic**: Extracts rebate payments to indexers and delegators from `Staking_RebateClaimed_event` logs, specifically the `tokens` field for indexer rebates and `delegationFees` field for delegator rebates, filtered for events where `unclaimedAllocationsCount` is not zero. Also includes curation rewards paid to curators extracted from `Staking_AllocationCollected_event` logs using the `curationFees` field. These represent direct costs of providing query services and maintaining data curation
- **Key fields**: Expense amounts from `tokens` and `delegationFees` (query rebates) and `curationFees` (curation rewards)

### Component C: Expense collection - token incentives
- **Purpose**: Captures protocol token distributions used to incentivize network growth and participation
- **Logic**: Extracts indexing rewards distributed to network participants from `RewardsManager_RewardsAssigned_event` logs using the `amount` field. These represent inflationary token rewards that incentivize indexing behavior but are treated as protocol expenses
- **Key fields**: Incentive amounts from the `amount` field in rewards assignment events

### Component D: Currency processing and aggregation
- **Purpose**: Standardizes all amounts to USD and aggregates by time period
- **Logic**: Applies decimal corrections to convert raw token amounts from blockchain precision to standard units based on GRT token metadata. Converts corrected amounts to USD using end-of-day price feeds matched by date and token address. Truncates all block timestamps to day boundaries for daily aggregation. Sums all revenue components and all expense components separately by day and chain
- **Key fields**: Final daily amounts in `revenue` and `expenses` denominated in USD

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Daily revenue totals are combined across all four revenue streams (query fees, curation taxes, delegation taxes, dispute fees) and daily expense totals are combined across both expense categories (cost of revenue and token incentives)
- **Currency conversion**: All amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day GRT price feeds, with decimal corrections applied first to ensure proper token unit scaling
- **Time aggregation**: All transaction timestamps are truncated to day boundaries, with amounts summed by day to produce daily earnings figures
- **Final calculation**: Daily earnings equals daily total revenue minus daily total expenses, with zero-filling applied for days without any protocol activity to maintain a complete time series

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Net profit (also profits, net income, profitability) — revenue remaining after subtracting expenses.

The GraphGRT

Earnings

Earnings

Competitive landscape