Should you index, or just delegate?

Most guides to running an indexer assume you have already decided. This one does not, because the decision is the expensive part and the software is not.

The baseline you are actually beating.

You have at least 100,000 GRT. You could delegate it to an existing indexer, do nothing, and take a return.

So indexing is not a choice between earning and not earning. It is a choice between a passive return and an active one, where the active one costs you infrastructure, attention, and the risk of doing it badly. The question is whether the difference covers all three.

Where an indexer’s advantage actually comes from.

Three places, and it is worth being clear that only one of them scales with effort.

Delegation. You can accept up to 16x your self-stake in delegated GRT, and you keep a cut of what that capital earns. This is the largest structural advantage in the role. An indexer earning a cut on many times their own capital is running a different business from one earning on their own stake alone.

It is also the hardest part to obtain. Delegators choose operators with a track record, and you do not have one yet.

Query fees. Real revenue, dependent on serving queries the gateway routes to you, which depends on your pricing and performance.

Better allocation than the average. If you understand which subgraphs are worth indexing better than the operator you would otherwise delegate to, you capture that difference. This is genuine and it is also the claim most people make without evidence.

The case for indexing.

Sound reasons, in roughly descending order:

• You already run infrastructure. If you operate chain nodes for another purpose, much of the marginal cost is already paid.
• You want the delegation business. The economics work when you are earning a cut on other people’s capital, and that requires being an indexer.
• You have a data thesis. You believe you can pick subgraphs better than the field, and you can say why.
• You want to serve a specific application well. Being the indexer your own product depends on is a legitimate reason that has nothing to do with yield.
• You want to strengthen the network. Also legitimate, and worth being explicit that it is a contribution rather than a trade.

The case against.

Equally sound, and more often correct:

• You want passive income. Indexing is not passive. Delegation is.
• You are at the minimum stake with no delegation. Fixed costs fall on a small base, and the arithmetic is hostile.
• You cannot respond to problems within hours. A broken deployment earns nothing and looks fine from outside. Stake behind an unnoticed failure is stake earning zero.
• You have not priced archive access. This is the cost that surprises people, and it recurs monthly.
• You would be doing it alone with no fallback. Holidays exist. Illness exists. The chain does not pause for either.

If the answer is yes, start narrow.

• One chain. The one you know best.
• A handful of subgraphs you have reasons for, not a list scraped by signal rank.
• Monitoring before scale. Knowing a deployment has failed matters more than supporting another network.
• Publish under a name, in the forum, from the start. The delegation business runs on being a known quantity, and that takes longer to build than the infrastructure does.

If the answer is no, that is a result.

Delegating is a real role with real returns and no operational burden. Deciding against indexing after working through the numbers is a better outcome than discovering the same thing eight months in with idle hardware.

The delegator path covers choosing an operator properly, and you will now be unusually good at it, because you know what the job involves.