SubQuery Chronicles: Reflecting on our Remarkable Journey

6 min readNov 30, 2023

SubQuery’s journey has been nothing short of remarkable since the inception of our SDK nearly three years ago.

In the years that followed, remarkable growth has propelled us to the forefront, establishing SubQuery as a key player in Web3 decentralised indexing. Join us as we take a nostalgic journey through our journey of progress.

SubQuery’s Genesis

Our origins trace back all the way back to November 2020, when extensive research within the Polkadot ecosystem brought to light a significant challenge confronting teams in non-EVM networks.

Back then, many web3 teams were unable to make progress due to the absence of a suitable indexing solution in non-EVM chains. They were unable to build and scale their applications or help any developers in their ecosystems build and scale theirs.

It was a crazy time, a terrible time, to be a dApp developer outside of EVM. Each new developer had to build their own custom indexer, making the development process not only extremely expensive but also complicated and time-consuming, particularly when juxtaposed with the relative ease of development on Ethereum.

And that’s why we launched SubQuery in February 2021, providing a much-needed respite to countless developers.

We quickly followed up with a solution to how our customers run their new projects, with the launch of our Managed Service in March 2021.

This not only empowered customers to effectively deploy their own projects to our managed service but also provided them the assurance of having dedicated experts focused on running production indexers reliably, allowing for a restful night and worry-free development.

Building the Foundations of Our Success

In 2021, we laid the foundation for the enduring principles that guide our SDK roadmap to this very day.

We are immensely proud of this because even after two years, every endeavor we undertake falls squarely under one or more of these three pillars.

The three pillars of SubQuery SDK Development are performance, customer-driven features, and wide-chain support.

Almost immediately, we made huge performance improvements through the SubQuery Dictionary and widened our chain support by incorporating the Frontier EVM smart contract layer.

Building on this momentum, 2022 marked a significant stride for us as we extended our support to other layer-1 blockchains starting with Avalanche, followed by Cosmos, Algorand, Flare, and NEAR Protocol. We reaffirmed our commitment to non-EVM networks and took a proactive approach to make our mark in this space.

In many networks, SubQuery was and still is the only independent, open-source, decentralised indexing service, solidifying our market leadership, a position we proudly maintain to this day.

Customer-Driven Feature Development

A notable aspect of SubQuery is our ongoing commitment to attentive listening and continuous learning from our customers. Their usage of SubQuery serves as a valuable source of insights for our company.

With this invaluable information, we’re able to innovate in the space faster and more efficiently, as well as deliver better outcomes to our customers.

In terms of new features, SubQuery added support for a variety of innovations in 2022, such as graphql subscriptions, multi-chain indexing, special block handler filters, and many more as requested by our customers.

At the core of SubQuery’s ethos is an unwavering commitment to our customers. Continually and relentlessly customer-focused, we’ve earned the trust of our clientele by consistently delivering, building a robust product, and actively listening to their needs.

Our Decentralised Network

2022 also marked the year that we really began work on our decentralised network. Our smart contracts quickly passed audit early in the year, and in March 2022 we launched our first testnet.

About 20 hand-selected indexers played an important role in our pioneering work. The process continued throughout the year, and our final version of our public testnet had over 2,361 indexers participating, one of the most recent test networks ever!

This was a perfect way to test out not only our smart contracts, but our ability to manage, support, and process thousands of participants on our network.

Accelerating our Network Expansion

The spotlight of 2023 has squarely been on EVM. In February, we unveiled our inaugural support for Ethereum, and since then, we’ve extended this support to include an additional 37 EVM chains.

At the time of writing, we support 119 chains, the widest level of support for any open-source indexer in web3. In other words, we are true to our vision that SubQuery will support you with the best indexing tools and services no matter where you are or what you decide to do with your web3 app.

We also reaffirmed our drive for performance with the launch of version 2.0 of the SubQuery SDK. This brought huge indexing speed improvements including multithreading, indexing data from multiple RPC endpoints, automatic RPC API batch sizing, and others. As a result, SubQuery received up to 2x faster performance over most networks.

Aside from real-time indexing, testing frameworks, and error logging, real-time indexing of unfinished blocks was also added. Later in the year, we dropped version 3.0 of SubQuery’s SDK, which brought major changes to the manifest file definition that allowed us to give more control to developers on how their project needs to be run.

Progress Never Stops

In under three years, SubQuery has evolved into one of the most high-performing and successful open-source decentralized indexers in the web3 space.

With current indexing support spanning almost 120 chains, SubQuery has established itself as a renowned brand, relied upon to deliver indexing solutions for major projects and some of the fastest-growing apps across diverse chains.

SubQuery has etched its reputation through collaborations with diverse ecosystems. As new developers delves into dApp development in Osmosis, Moonbeam, Stellar, Optimism, and many more, they’ll find the comprehensive guides and workshops showcasing what we can offer them.

This is part of our strategy of meeting our customers where they are. We’re not just a faceless entity, we’re a team that engages, supports, listens, and collaborates with you. Together, we strive to empower you in building and scaling your own dApps with us right beside you throughout your entire journey.

About SubQuery

SubQuery is a leading blockchain data indexer that provides developers with fast, flexible, universal, and decentralised APIs for web3 projects. We empower developers from close to 120 ecosystems including Ethereum, Polygon, Polkadot, Cosmos, Algorand, NEAR, and Avalanche with rich indexed data to allow them to build intuitive and immersive decentralised applications. This blockchain developer toolkit enables developers to focus on their core use case and front-end without wasting time building a custom backend for data processing activities. In the near future, the SubQuery Network will replicate this scalable and reliable solution in a completely decentralised manner.