April 2021 Recap

April was an incredibly busy month for SubQuery, our growth is starting to accelerate at a serious pace and we’re breaking new records each day. As we mentioned last month, our focus in the short term is on two elements; scaling our platform to keep up with skyrocketing demand, and engaging with more and more partners to help them create their own SubQuery projects.

In this monthly update:

• Focus on Partner tools — SubQuery Managed Service Launch
• BiFrost SubQuery use case
• Scalability Improvements by our service provider OnFinality
• And more…

On the partner front we launched a key product that is needed to operationally accelerate the growth of SubQuery. Before you could create and run your own SubQuery projects locally or in your own infrastructure. Projects allows users to publish their projects to the SubQuery community and we’ll run them in a high performance, scalable, and managed public service — for free!

This final missing piece now means we have a complete suite of tools to enable and empower customers to explore, create, run, and then publish SubQuery projects all on their own.

In April, Bifrost Finance launched the beta of their new dApp, the official interactive interface for all Bifrost services. Through this dApp, users can mint vTokens, redeem and swap these derivatives, and view their earnings in real time.

SubQuery’s service helps Bifrost power much of the data shown in their new dApp. All historical data on transfers, minting, and redemption events (such as price, date, currency and pool) are aggregated and queried from SubQuery’s advanced indexing and query service. For example, SubQuery allows Bifrost to calculate real time mint and redemption prices for vDot and vEth to show in their app, and to get the total number of vTokens in a certain wallet.

The new Bifrost SubQuery project in the SubQuery Explorer

"Without SubQuery, it is difficult to imagine how complicated it is to manually collect data from the chain. Bifrost developers may spend a lot of time searching for all transaction data on chain to be used for transaction history. SubQuery helps developers save a lot of repetitive work costs. Bifrost will cooperate with SubQuery for a long time to accelerate the iterative speed of product development" — Bifrost Finance

OnFinality is a key service provider for SubQuery — most of the SubQuery indexers in Polkadot and Kusama projects are using OnFinality’s public API endpoints to get their data. The significant traffic from SubQuery is one of the reasons why OnFinality is the largest infrastructure provider in the Polkadot/Kusama ecosystem.

In April, OnFinality hit a long term goal of 100 million in a single day, in fact they smashed it with 127 million requests in 24 hours (almost 1,500 each second).

OnFinality also delivered their treasury proposal for the second milestone to improve the scalability of their API service. Intelligent routing that allows them to maximise the use of different clusters of nodes across their user base in different geographic regions. SubQuery relies on this infrastructure so it’s important to note the continued investment and improvements here. The past month has demonstrated how critical it is to continue to invest in scale so that we can continue to provide the best service every day.

• Our CEO Sam Zou presented Cyber future on Parachains online event with Web3, Acala, Polkawarriors, and Bitfwd
• Our Head of Business Development James Bayly joined an interesting virtual fireside chat with DFG and James Wo as part of their DFG Talks series.
• Our time in the Berkeley Xcelerator has started — we’ve attended some excellent sessions so far
• We’ve made some big improvements to our SubQuery website
• A new release of improved documentation for SubQuery developers
• Our offices are improving, we’re lucky to be able to work in the same space here in New Zealand

Expect some big news coming in May for our community — we’ve been working on something massive and we can’t wait to share it. In the meantime, have a go creating your own SubQuery project by following our new quick start guide here.