Community, Community, Community!

Welcome to another monthly update from SubQuery. As you all know, community is a key element for every successful crypto project — this month we’ve started to expand our focus in this area.

In this monthly update:

• Ambassador Program 👩💼
• DApp API Grant Work 🏗
• Patract Open Platform 🌃
• Parity’s Relaychain podcast 🎙
• Documentation Improvements 📑

We understand that one of our biggest strengths is our community, and so we recently launched our ambassador program for communities around the world. We were overwhelmed by the interest in our program, with almost 500 applications received in under a fortnight!

We’re in the process of onboarding our first batch of ambassadors very shortly. We’re particularly excited here because it means that everyone in our community can expect to see better local representation and support in different communities!

By the end of July we’ve made good progress on the first two milestones of our open-source dApp API treasury grant. Although on the surface it doesn’t look like much, it is actually a really important initiative for us. Firstly it represents deep strategic cooperation with one of the largest Polkadot native wallets, Fearless Wallet.

Secondly, this open-source API should be able to provide different types of applications with a sufficient (but read-only) view of all key data within the Kusama chain. E.g. a developer could use it to create their own chain explorer without needing to directly query chain data.

We’re building this in a way that makes it easy to extend to the growing number of parachains. It’ll also provide a much better foundation for new applications building on SubQuery, allowing us onboard new partnerships faster!

We have joined the Patract Open Platform alliance to jointly promote the development of public infrastructure, promote the evolution of contract technology, and to develop the Wasm contract development ecosystem.

We believe that contracts are an important part of a thriving Polkadot ecosystem, providing data indexing services for Wasm contracts has always been a major goal of SubQuery. It is exciting to see that the Open Platform has brought together a large number of great projects, and that everyone is working together to contribute to the healthy and stable advancement of Wasm contracts.

Earlier last month I joined Jorrin Burns on Parity’s Relay Chain Podcast, we talked about our mission and how we were working with projects in our ecosystem. We also discussed how collaboration and feedback from other Polkadot projects in New Zealand (like Acala and Bitcountry) has influenced several of our value-added features, our long-term plans to become a parachain, and the road to 1 billion API requests.

You can listen to the podcast on your favourite platform here.

“Documentation may not be glamorous work but it plays a vital role in communicating how something works and allows us to empower our community members to learn and unleash their creativity. That is why we believe documentation is so important” — Sean Au (SubQuery Academy)

Our new documentation website has an inviting landing page designed to welcome all users, regardless of their technical understanding of blockchain or Polkadot. From the landing page users can jump straight into a getting started tutorial, or navigate off to the help they need.

Traditionally, blockchain documentation is incredibly technical and littered with jargon — you have to come from a developer background to easily understand it. We’ve taken a different path and written content for users at all levels of experience.

Our goal is to publish a tutorial for every piece of major functionality in SubQuery. That means a step-by-step video and written guide with working examples as outcomes — you can see the beginnings of our efforts here in the Tutorials section.

We consistently receive feedback from our community that we have some of the best documentation in our industry. We promise to keep it that way!