Dispatches
Written on a date, and left that way.
42 pieces of dated writing, moved here from the Lodestar Intel Feed. Guides, analysis, and notes from actually running this infrastructure.
How a dispatch differs from an entry
An entry is a maintained fact. It carries a re-verification date, and when it goes past that date the page says so.
A dispatch is a snapshot: what was true, and what somebody thought about it, on the day it was written. It is not maintained and it does not expire, because revising it would destroy the thing it is for. Read the date at the top and judge accordingly.
42 dispatches
2026
- The Performance Charts Are Back, and Now They Add Up Query Performance, the QoS Quality panel and the directory's QoS column are back on Lodestar, read from Edge & Node's QoS oracle postings on Gnosis through a nest anyone can run. Rebuilding them showed the old charts averaged averages, hid outages and sat on a subgraph that had dropped whole buckets. Getting the new ones live took three days of faults, most of them silent and several of them ours. This is every figure, every fault, and how we checked.
- Dune for Lodestar: What Graph Data Is Actually There, and the Horizon-Shaped Hole We are wiring Dune into Lodestar as a second data source, alongside the indexing we run ourselves. Nothing is live yet. But the survey done to get there is useful on its own: 830 decoded Graph tables already exist, HorizonStaking is decoded under the legacy ABI so provisions and thaw requests are absent, and seven Horizon contracts are not decoded at all. Verified by address on 14 September 2026.
- The P&L Panel Was Wrong, and Daily Trends Is Back Rebuilding Lodestar's Daily Trends chart meant defining an indexer's daily rewards carefully, and doing that showed the P&L panel had been getting them wrong. Over the 30 days to 13 September it misstated 54 of the 58 indexers that were paid. Both are fixed today. Here is exactly what was wrong, how we checked the new figures, and what is still to come.
- Lodestar Is a Frontend Now Ninety-three API route files became none. Thirty-eight thousand lines came out of the frontend, six credentials left Vercel, and the migration kept finding bugs that had been live for months, not because anyone audited the code but because two implementations were forced to agree on the same answer. The last one went the same day, once a question about a signing key was settled by answering it rather than by working around it.
- The Rewrite We Didn't Do Lodestar's frontend rewrite was planned in two stages: tidy the Next.js app first, then move it to Vite. The first stage is finished and the second is not happening, on the plan's own terms. Getting there found two dashboard pages that errored for everyone who had a position, a badge reading NaN%, and a permit leak in the backend that had been waiting since the day it was written.
- Lodestar Now Reads No Graph Subgraph At All In July we moved two panels off The Graph and said the rest was a long road. On 6 September the last of it landed: there is no gateway client in the Lodestar repo, no GRAPH_API_KEY, and no fallback. Every protocol number on the dashboard now comes from a nest we run ourselves. Here is what moved, what we deleted instead of moving, and what still talks to a gateway on purpose.
- Lodestar's API Is Now One Rust Process Thirty-six of Lodestar's ninety API routes stopped being serverless functions today and became one long-lived Rust process on a box we own. The median route got 657 times faster, the cold path did not improve at all, and the migration found two bugs that had been quietly breaking the dashboard for months. Here is the accounting.
- We Read the Foundation's New Roadmap. Anyway, Here's Our GitHub A completely humble review of Project Catalyst, in which we discover that the community accidentally pre-built most of it.
- Amp's Paper Trail: What Survived the Repo Going Private edgeandnode/amp 404s if you ask anonymously. But a December 2025 snapshot got out before the door shut, a public binary is still on ghcr.io, and BUSL-1.1 has quite a lot to say about what you may do with both. Here is the full paper trail, with dates, repo IDs, and the licence read properly.
- Lodestar now serves two panels from its own indexer, not The Graph Two of Lodestar's panels, the delegation-activity feed and the developer-activity chart, no longer read from The Graph. They read from nuthatch: a single self-hosted Rust binary indexing the Graph Protocol contracts on Arbitrum directly, serving SQL over content-addressed Parquet, on one small VPS. Here's how it works, how we proved it's correct, and the runtime deadlock we had to root-cause to get there.
- Which subgraphs break under graph-node 0.42? A network-wide decode audit graph-node 0.42 swapped its ABI decoder from ethabi to alloy, and alloy is strict where ethabi was absurdly lenient, so some ethereum.decode() calls now silently return null and subgraphs quietly stop producing data. The type string is a compile-time constant in the mapping WASM, so the whole network is auditable without syncing a thing. I scanned all 7,668 signalled deployments. Eight are affected.
- gib: a Graph gateway in a box Announcing gib v0.2, a self-hostable Graph Protocol gateway distribution, and an honest map of exactly how far 'self-hostable' currently goes. The software is one docker compose up; the network position is escrow funding plus a human conversation with each indexer.
- Redstart: I Stopped Trying to Replace AssemblyScript I built Matchstick in 2021 and have been trying to get off AssemblyScript ever since. None of these grievances are new; I have a graveyard of attempts to prove it. Redstart is where it ends, and it turns out the answer was a transpiler all along.
- Lodestone: Turn a One-Paragraph Idea Into a Working Horizon Data Service We'd hand-built the same Horizon data service ten times. So we distilled the pattern into a Claude Code plugin that generates a complete, building, payment-gated service from a short spec, and proved it by shipping a deliberately absurd one.
- State of The Graph: H1 2026 An independent narrative update covering Q4 2025 through H1 2026, picking up where Messari's State of The Graph Q4 2025 left off. Network fundamentals held near multi-year highs while GRT printed a new all-time low, and the only question that matters now is whether new data-service fees can grow faster than issuance.
- Yes, camp is better than amp. And we proved it. We ran camp-node v0.5.1 head-to-head against the only amp binary anyone can actually download, on the same box, through the same RPC, with the numbers written down. camp is faster, leaner, more open, and speaks three query protocols to amp's one. Here's the honest version: wins, ties, and the one place amp still leads.
- Hold the Wall: Announcing The Night's Watch I'm one person with a laptop and a Claude Code subscription, and I can't deploy and maintain every data service the network needs on my own. The Night's Watch is an open community for the people who want to: to harden, test, maintain and ultimately run the open data layer The Graph was always supposed to have.
- We Ran a Real Payment Through the Live Substreams Data Service When we announced SDSCE we said the payment loop was proven on a fork. A fork isn't mainnet. So we staked real GRT against the live contract, registered a provider, and collected a real signed RAV on Arbitrum One, and the 1% burn reconciled to the wei. Here's exactly how we did it, and what it proves about the live service.
- The Indexer Is the Farmer: Horizon Needs You to Run New Data Services Horizon turns The Graph from a subgraph network into an open marketplace for any data service. But a marketplace with one supplier isn't a marketplace; it's a demo. We've deployed several new data services and we're dogfooding them alone. That has to change, and only indexers can change it.
- Substreams, meet Horizon: announcing SDSCE We built a community edition of the Substreams Data Service, a Horizon payment layer that lets providers sell Substreams data for TAP receipts, and deployed it to Arbitrum One. Here is what it is, how the money flows, and how providers can self-onboard.
- camp Deep Dive: Decoded Protocol Data, Raw SQL, and the Flight Shim A technical look at how camp v0.2.0 decodes Uniswap V3 and Graph Horizon events on-the-fly, how the raw SQL endpoint guards against abuse without a parser, and why ampd v0.0.36 required a Flight shim to stay online.
- camp: A Free Decoded Arbitrum API Built on a Self-Hosted Amp Node camp is a free, tip-fresh REST API for decoded Arbitrum One data (ERC-20 transfers, gas analytics, whale feeds, raw SQL) backed by a self-hosted Amp node running on a ThinkPad. Here's what it is, how it works, and what comes next.
- Lodestar 3.0.0 Lodestar reaches 3.0.0. The dashboard is stable, the team is proud of what we built, and we're being honest about what comes next.
- We're Stopping the Lodestar Indexer We registered lodestar-indexer.eth two weeks ago. We're shutting it down. Here's the honest accounting.
- Solana has entered the chat We built a Horizon data service that indexes Solana, specifically Jupiter v6 swaps, streamed in real time from a Yellowstone gRPC node and served with TAP receipts via PostgREST. Here is what we built, how it works, and how to run or query it.
- How to Claim a Sync Bounty as an Indexer Developers can now post on-chain GRT bounties for subgraph deployments they need indexed. Here's the complete walkthrough for indexers, from spotting a bounty to collecting the GRT.
- We Made Our Indexer Use Its Own RPC Network (And It Worked) We run a Graph Protocol indexer. We also built Dispatch, a decentralised JSON-RPC gateway paid in GRT via TAP receipts. So we pointed our indexer at our own network. Here's what broke, and what it proved.
- How to Start a Graph Indexer in 2026 We just did this. Everything that the docs don't tell you: hardware, RPC, Horizon's on-chain quirks, graft chains, and the honest economics.
- Lodestar Is Now an Indexer We've spent months building a dashboard that tracks indexers. Today we became one.
- Dispatch Has a Second Provider: PaulieB from Graphtronauts A single-provider network is infrastructure theatre. Two providers is where actual decentralisation starts. PaulieB from the Graphtronauts community just provisioned on Dispatch. Here's what that means and why it matters.
- How to Build and Deploy a Data Service on The Graph's Horizon Framework A complete technical walkthrough of building a production Horizon data service, from Solidity contract to off-chain payment collection, drawn from two real implementations: Dispatch and SubstreamsDataService.
- Dispatch vs Alchemy vs Infura: Real RPC Pricing Numbers Concrete, code-derived cost comparisons between Dispatch and the major centralised RPC providers, plus a step-by-step guide to getting an RPC URL from the Dispatch network today.
- How to Run a Local Amp Node, Part 2: What You'll See After a Day Part 1 covered installing ampd and deploying a dataset. This post is about what happens next: what Amp actually writes to disk, what it costs in RAM, and the operational details the setup docs don't mention.
- Dispatch: An Experimental Community JSON-RPC Service on Horizon Every dApp on Earth relies on Alchemy or Infura for JSON-RPC. Dispatch is a community-built experiment exploring what a decentralised JSON-RPC data service on The Graph's Horizon protocol might look like. The first provider is live and serving real traffic on Arbitrum One.
- Graphite: Write The Graph Subgraphs in Rust AssemblyScript is the only language graph-node accepts, or so everyone assumed. Graphite compiles Rust to WASM that graph-node cannot tell apart from AssemblyScript. No patches. No forks. Already live on Arbitrum One.
- GRT at the Floor: Illiquidity, Inflation, and the Long Game The Graph's token is near historical lows. Here's the honest story of how it got there, and what, if anything, changes next.
- How Much RAM Does It Actually Take to Index 1,000 Subgraphs? The Graph's 184 GB 'Large' tier was written four years ago for a few hundred subgraphs. Here's what the memory math actually looks like for 1,000, and what it would take to index all 15,500.
- How to Run a Local Amp Node Edge & Node's Amp is available as a hosted service, but you can run it yourself. Here's how to self-host a local ampd node, with no waitlists and no dependency on E&N infrastructure.
- Arbitrum Indexer Infrastructure: Smaller Archives & Fixing Sync Lag Two problems, one post: the new PathDB/PebbleDB archive node that cuts disk from 38TB to 4TB, and the two graph-node settings that stop your subgraphs sitting 10–30 blocks behind chain head forever.
- Intro to Amp: The Graph's Blockchain-Native Database Edge & Node built a blockchain-native database that turns smart contract events into SQL tables automatically. Here's what Amp is, how it works, and what it means for The Graph ecosystem.
- Intro to Tycho and the Tycho Data Service Tycho indexes DEX liquidity in real time so solvers, market makers, and searchers don't have to. Here's what it is, how it works, and why it's coming to The Graph Network.
- The 3 Rules of Graph-Node Stack Architecture There are many ways to set up your graph-node stack, but the constraints boil down to 3 rules. A practical guide to node roles, sharding, tiered indexing, and the pitfalls that catch everyone.