{"document_id":"BLC-STUDY-0047","slug":"the-graph","title":"The Graph: a decentralised query protocol for blockchains","authors":"Yaniv Tal, Brandon Ramirez and the Graph team","year":2020,"date_label":"2020","publisher":"Yaniv Tal, Brandon Ramirez and the Graph team","paper_type":"Design paper","category":"Data and agents","topics":["Data and agents"],"source_url":"https://github.com/graphprotocol/research","source_label":"Graph research papers","legacy_pdf_path":null,"sha256":null,"sha256_note":"No hash is published. This build does not store those PDF bytes, so a checksum would be invented. Where a legacy path exists, it points at the Internet Archive copy of the old library.","version":"Source cited by the 2020 study. The study is the reading. This page does not add a second essay.","doi":null,"rights_status":"Official external source only","source_status":"Official source","use_status":"Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.","licence":null,"licence_label":"No licence recorded. Rights status under review.","full_text":null,"full_text_reason":"Full text is not published on this page. Public availability is not a licence to republish a document. Blockchain Lab has not recorded a licence that permits an HTML transcription, a training set, or a retrieval corpus of the paper. Text on this page is Blockchain Lab's own wording, or a pointer to a study that is also Blockchain Lab's wording.","editorial_line":"The Graph's protocol paper for indexing chain data. Indexers stake on serving a subgraph. Curators signal which subgraphs matter. Consumers pay for queries. The problem is read access, not consensus.","canonical_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/the-graph","record_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/the-graph","study_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/the-graph","last_reviewed":"2026-10-01","last_checked":"2026-10-01","relationships":[{"rel":"Canonical reading","label":"The Graph study","href":"/whitepaper/the-graph"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"Chainlink","href":"/whitepaper/chainlink"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"Ocean","href":"/whitepaper/ocean"}]}