Announcing the SubQuery Explorer

4 min readMar 5, 2021

Since announcing SubQuery to the world just a month ago, the response and feedback we’ve received from the Polkadot community has been overwhelmingly positive. We’ve gained thousands of followers on our channels, and there have been over 1,353 installs from NPM. It’s inspiring to receive all the messages of support, and to see the engagement from the community. It’s time for us to give something back!

We’ve been working overtime over the last month to release the next major stage of our roadmap for SubQuery. Today we’re announcing the release of the SubQuery Explorer.

SubQuery Explorer is an online hosted service that provides access to published SubQuery projects made by contributors around the world and managed by the SubQuery team. It furthers our mission to support Polkadot developers by providing infrastructure services by making accessing Polkadot network data even easier.

Today, anyone can query and extract Polkadot network data in only minutes and at no cost.

The SubQuery explorer makes getting started easy. We’ve prebuilt SubQuery projects for two use cases (more about these below) and have indexed each network. We’re hosting these SubQuery nodes online and allow anyone to query each for free. These managed nodes will be monitored and run by the SubQuery team at a performance level that will allow production apps to use and rely on them.

You’ll also note that the SubQuery Explorer provides a playground for discovering available data with example queries. You can play around with each SubQuery Graph using this explorer without implementing anything in code. Additionally, we’ve made some small improvements to our documentation to better support developers on their journey to better query and analyse the world’s Polkadot data.

Launch Use Cases

Staking Sum SubQuery Project (GitHub Project Code)

You can quickly find total staking revenue awarded to any account since the beginning of time by querying their account address. This subquery project indexes and records the accounts participating in the staking bond on the blockchain. The continued indexing will find out obtained staking reward and slashes for this account and aggregates their sums to a database.

Validator Threshold SubQuery Project (GitHub Project Code)

You can quickly see the minimum staking amount required for a validator to be elected. This project is an excellent example of implementing query states in the mapping function. It first finds the active staking Era through a state query and records the validators of this session staking amount by each. It then calculates the minimum staking amount and the total amount staked in this Era. Lastly, it records the maximum number of nominators that can be rewarded.

What’s Next

This SubQuery Explorer is just the first set of our plans to build a community hub for Polkadot data. We’re going to follow up with the following features:

We’re focusing on community tools, so you can expect more in depth developer documentation, easy to follow tutorials, and example projects that highlight some really cool use cases for the data that SubQuery surfaces.
More SubQuery projects will slowly come online based on community feedback,we’d love some ideas on what you’d love to see next — reach out on any of our social channels (see below)
We’re going to build a partner platform, so that our community can build and upload their own SubQuery projects and we’ll manage and host them for you for free.

Learn More

Start querying data on the new SubQuery Explorer

Build your own SubQuery project by following our SubQuery docs

Visit our website

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