Subsquid Pro Quo (AKA the Necessiware)

You give me the data – I give you the order. – Unknown

You opened your eyes to witness another glorious day. The slight rain drumbeat on your window sings the don’t-get-out-of-the-bed song. “No one has ever farmed airdrops while sleeping” – you say to yourself. Time to get to “work”. Your face lightens up with the adequate dose of blue light radiating from your phone.

“What would Uncle Huberman say about my sleep habits?” a thought crosses your mind but then you start thinking of all the femboi sugar babes you will waste your hard-airdropped money on. You log into your wallet. Another day, another dollar…

The attempt at stoicism is fleeting; soon, neurons of despair and anger ignite within your brain like supernovas. You don’t know it yet (nor do these unfortunate devs) but there is a solution called Subsquid…

Infrastraktcha

Zee Prime has been investing in crypto infrastructure since its inception, way before it was popular. We have been vocal about it, and then something changed. Once we realized that the best PMF for the so-called Dev2Dev business model is pitching sessions with naive VCs looking for “picks and shovels”, we grew skeptical. But even in the red sea of infrastructure, there might just be a meaty little squid that is of interest.

Our primary condition to assess infrastructure teams is time-in-crypto: how long have you been building here to understand the problems and pressures of building infra? Subsquid came to us as a chance meeting when we were helping to build HydraDX in 2021. It was an unknown team with a superior solution we needed. Since then they have grown, matured, and wowed many.

What is Subsquid

Subsquid is a decentralized data lake and a query engine designed to provide developers with… Who cares, right? Let’s try again for those with shorter attention spans.

What is it? Fast, scalable, agnostic... just like your last relationship, with the kind of ex you think of fondly from time to time. Your crypto wallet is hungry for data, your favorite crypto frontend is hungry for data; you don’t see it, but it eats... a lot. This is the American diet we are talking about. But this food chain needs logistics – someone needs to deliver calories on time.

Subsquid is the highway builder and maintainer, bringing delicious data to feed the mouths of every crypto household. Because the current infra setup is inefficient, Subsquid is rebuilding the architecture of Web 3 traffic from the ground up, specifically in terms of how various data is stored and retrieved. It’s a response to unscalable and rigid monolithic indexing frameworks; it’s a way forward, leaving Communistic one-size-fits-all methods in the past.

Data consumers will access data stored in one database and queried using SQL (nerds will know; for the rest of us, just know it’s cool and easy to use). Data is divided among many worker nodes on the Subsquid network – no more need for hundreds of replicas of the same archival data. On top of that, thanks to this division and redundancy among many worker nodes, queries can be PARALLELIZED (bullish buzzword alert!)

This means Subsquid is leaner, and it does everything we need much more efficiently. In fact, Subsquid indexes 100-1000x faster than your next favorite indexer. Compared to data access using a conventional chain node RPC, Subsquid Network allows access to data at near zero cost, in a more granular fashion, and from multiple blocks at once.

The heavy, beefy chains like Solana that produce A LOT of data are hard to index. But soon, Subsquid is gonna feed all your favorite Solana apps where you collect airdrop points. Miracles do happen when someone with a Ph.D. in Mathematics gets obsessed about something, and that object is not an OnlyFans model.

But why Subsquid?

As our favorite blockchain toys become faster, our demand for their responsiveness and availability is growing even faster. It's no longer a question of middleware; it's "necessiware" – the kind of product without which we cannot achieve the desired satisfaction level when interacting with all those fancy crypto frontends.

Data needs to flow swiftly, be reliable, and be cost-effective. That's why Subsquid exists – it's the result of what we need, though perhaps not what we deserve. Yes, the Web 3 superhero is Squidman; deal with it.

So, call on Squidman when your favorite airdrop farming frontend is unresponsive, when your wallet takes too long to load balances, and you worry that someone might have hacked you. We know, we know…

Whatever your ambition is in crypto. Wherever you go, knowingly or not, you will encounter the infamous “I-just-want-the-data-man” problem. Now, you have the solution. Call on Squidman. No blockchain is a match for him; he covered more than 100 of them, and you can count on Squidman to be the first one to index a shiny new EVM. This hero is so fast that he even thrives on Solana speeds.

Since the data lake built by Subsquid is agnostic, it also supports non-blockchain data. The upcoming integration will be price feeds, and then the permissionless chain and indexed data integration. Hop on the buzzword train to the trendyland.

Support for Solana will be added in the coming months, followed by Cosmos and Celestia by 3Q. For SQL integration we have to wait for another year, but as with video games, some things are better when given enough time to cook. Subsquid will also add integrations for enterprise data tools (e.g. Kafka and Snowflake).

On top of that, “hot blocks” (wink-wink) will be added to Subsquid’s data lake. This means including blocks that have not been finalized yet – it provides a fast and cost-effective way to get the most up-to-date data for very (VERY) demanding use cases and serve the frontends.

Do Your Part!

So, what are you waiting for? Act NOW; don’t wait until CT starts shilling you the Graph of Solana or the Parallelized Indexer.

Here are some things YOU can do:

• If you’re a crypto pleb, call your DAO manager and demand Subsquid;
• If you’re a crypto founder, replace your data provider with Subsquid (tell them Zee Prime sent you to get a discount). More than 5,000 founders have already done it and got data served 40 billion times;
• If you’re a crypto hustler, run a Subsquid indexer and get SQD tokens. Nearly 60,000 indexers have already been deployed – but it’s testnet so you’re still early.

Disclosure: Zee Prime has overinvested in Subsquid by A LOT.