📝 Editor’s Note:
At OurNetwork, data protocols is a broad term we use to categorize projects in crypto which deal with onchain data in some way. Use cases range from fetching blockchain data, to accessibly serving it up, to storing it.
For part 1 of this 2 part series OurNetwork is featuring four contributors — Christina is covering The Graph, Will is covering Arweave, Maus has taken on Covalent, and Sean is looking into Gas Network.
– ON Editorial Team
– ON Editorial Team
Data Protocols 📊
The Graph | Arweave | Covalent | Gas Network
The Graph 🧑🚀
👥 Christina Mills | Website | Dashboard
📈 Steady Momentum in the Adoption of The Graph as Subgraph Growth Continues, 7% Data Consumer growth QoQ. Developer activity surges in Q2.
✏️ Editor's Note:
Subgraphs are custom APIs that extract, process, and store blockchain information, making it easy to access. Developers use GraphQL, a query language for subgraphs, to retrieve the specific data they need from these APIs.
Looking at subgraph data, Q1 2025 shows strong momentum with 12,402 active subgraphs, representing a 9.8% quarter-over-quarter increase from the 11,294 in Q4 2024. The ecosystem has exploded by a factor of over 11 since Q2 2023, with the most dramatic acceleration occurring in Q2 2024 (246% growth to 7,370). Growth has now stabilized at healthy double-digit rates, with Q1 2025 adding 1,108 net new subgraphs, indicating strong developer adoption and platform maturity.
Developer activity surges in Q2. April 2025 hit a peak with 199,068 total NPM downloads (121,605 CLI + 77,463 TS). Q2 2025 shows exceptional momentum as April and May alone generated 438,106 downloads, marking the strongest two month period on record. Graph CLI adoption has accelerated by 65% since February.
