The Graph is a decentralized protocol for indexing and querying data from blockchains.

The Graph is a decentralized protocol for indexing and querying blockchain data. The Graph makes it possible to query data that is difficult to query directly.

Projects with complex smart contracts like Uniswap and NFTs initiatives like Bored Ape Yacht Club store data on the Ethereum blockchain, making it really difficult to read anything other than basic data directly from the blockchain.

In the case of Bored Ape Yacht Club, The Graph can perform basic read operations on the contract like getting the owner of a certain Ape, getting the content URI of an Ape based on their ID, or the total supply, as these read operations are programmed directly into the smart contract, but more advanced real-world queries and operations like aggregation, search, relationships, and non-trivial filtering are not possible.

To get this such king of data, the user would have to process every single transfer event ever emitted, read the metadata from IPFS using the Token ID and IPFS hash, and then aggregate it. Even for these types of relatively simple questions, it would take hours or even days for a decentralized application running in a browser to get an answer.

Users could also build out their own server, process the transactions there, save them to a database, and build an API endpoint on top of it all in order to query the data. However, this option is resource intensive, needs maintenance, presents a single point of failure, and breaks important security properties required for decentralization.

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