Before you commit stake

Test the economics rather than the trivia, then plan the monitoring you would need before you allocate anything real.

Checked against Graph Horizon (2025-12-11)

Last read 2026-08-30 Due again 2026-11-30

Every protocol claim below was read at these sources on 2026-08-30. Where they disagree with each other, the entry says so.

Two parts. Work the decision honestly, then plan the monitoring you would need before committing anything.

Before you commit stake

  • Write down your capital and compare it against the protocol minimum. State plainly whether you can also accept delegation, and how you intend to attract any.
  • Price archive access for every chain you intend to index, monthly, as a real number.
  • Compute what the same capital would earn delegated to an existing indexer, doing nothing. That is the number you must beat.
  • Pick three subgraphs you would allocate to and write one sentence each on why, without referring to their signal rank.
  • Open a dashboard and check whether those three are already crowded with allocated stake.
  • List the four silent failure modes from this collection and say, for each, what alert you would build.
  • Decide your max_amount_willing_to_lose_grt and write down the reasoning, not just the number.
  • Name the person who covers your alerts when you are unavailable. If there is no name, that is your finding.

An honest closing note

Where next

  • The procedures this collection deliberately omits: official indexing documentation.
  • Live indexing status, POI comparison and performance data: Lodestar.
  • Who sets the parameters you have been reading, and how they change: governance.
  • What the people signalling on your subgraphs are thinking: curator.