(in simple words)
The article was written because of a large number of questions in our favorite Crypto Narnia chat about this protocol, its place in the ecosystem of blockchain projects and in the Coinmarketcap rating, the price of the GRT token (which growth seems inadequate to many), etc.
In order to understand the essence of The Graph, without going into technical details, at first it is worth to realise the main reason preveting the active development of blockchain technologies and web 3.0, exactly, the isolation of blockchain data from the outside user. A blockchain working on its own is of little interest and practically useless for the rest world. At the same time, the possibility of its application in real life necessarily ran into the lack of a clear interface for such interaction.
Imagine the blockchain is a personal computer. It doesn’t matter which one. Just as PCs are completely different in performance, technology level, age, popularity, etc., so blockchains are also completely different, for solving different tasks, known and not so well.
Now imagine that you have such a PC, but it does not have a keyboard with a mouse and a monitor, as well. The first question that immediately comes to mind is “Well, why do you need such a computer if it is absolutely impossible to use it?” and after all, we can not say that it is completely useless . It has a great potential, a powerful processor, the ability to automate something there, performs so many operations per second, etc. (you can add it yourself).
This is exactly what the situation with the blockchain looked like fairly recently. The problem of transferring data from the real world to the blockchain was brilliantly solved by the Chainlink project. And now our PC has a data input interface — keyboard and mouse. It remains a small matter — to fasten the monitor! And here The Graph comes to our aid. If Chainlink delivers data from the outside world to the blockchain, then The Graph, on the contrary, takes them out for everyone to see.
As a result, for the first time we get a system that is fully functional and convenient for use in a variety of areas. The Chainlink — blockchain — The Graph bundle will inevitably lead us to the very mass adoption that all crypto-enthusiasts have been dreaming about for years. And this is what today is the basis for the future growth of the entire crypto industry to such heights that the boom of 2017 will seem like a warm-up before the start.
Of course, there is still a lot of work ahead to launch and configure the protocol — migration of subgraphs, connection of other blockchains, in addition to ethereum, etc. But huge prospects for the development of the protocol and web 3.0 are already visible.
During the curatorial program, I became imbued with this idea, became attached to the project and, of course, I want to say that The Graph will set the trend for years to come, but this is true only in the context of the line of the most popular and cool monitors.:) And in fact, it is the joint work of Chainlink and The Graph that will breathe life into blockchains.
Ipurposely did not touch on the issues of speculation with the GRT token in the article, because this is an extremely thankless topic for analysis. But if you are concerned about what place The Graph will take among other blockchain projects, then I think you should look in the direction of Ethereum and Chainlink — its place is there.
