AMA Recap: Discussing the Future of SQD
There have been many changes at SQD in recent days, from a major rebranding from Subsquid to SQD to a blog post that shares our game plan for the future. If you still think that SQD is just an indexing protocol, you’ll be surprised.
For now, the niche SQD is serving is certainly indexing, but that’s a small percentage of the whole vision. During the X AMA on July 18th, SQD CEO and technical Co-Founder Dmitry Zhelezov answered community questions and shared further insights into what’s next.
You can listen to the recording here. Read on for a recap of the most important things discussed.
Thoughts on rebranding
Dmitry also occasionally uses Subsquid instead of SQD, quickly correcting himself and pointing out that it’s still a rather recent transition and that we’re still getting used to it. More importantly, though, it signals that SQD went from a research and development project to being actually production-ready.
“At a lower level, we’ve already enabled data accessibility. The next step is elevating it to a larger market share and going beyond indexing to serve niche verticals such as AI, analytics, and, of course, the evolving ecosystem of dApps.”
On philosophical association
"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation." - Plato
Since Dmitry’s official description on LinkedIn for the longest time was Chief Philosopher, it begs the question of what type of philosophy he pursued. Now we have achieved clarity on that.
SQD CEO sees himself as a disciple of Plato, who gave platonic relationships their name and was more a vibes person than his platonic friend Aristotle. Together, they belong to the greatest thinkers of Western philosophy, even though Stoicism sells more books these days.
“I’ve been in academia doing math for ten years. One of the themes you notice is that there is a world of ideas, and the most fruitful ones are often found by different people simultaneously without them being in communication. That suggests that things aren’t necessarily invented but discovered. At SQD, this also applies in that things evolve based on their internal logic.”
SQD's current focus
For now, the most common perception of SQD is as an indexing solution that sits in the same bracket as The Graph. Dmitry explained that usually, developers have smart contracts or other events they need to observe to display in a user interface. To facilitate that with blockchains, a process that constantly listens, extracts, decodes, and puts the data in a digestible format. To facilitate even something seemingly simple as showing a user the volumes traded on a specific NFT collection requires organizing a lot of onchain information. And it needs to be fast since people are impatient.
That’s what indexing facilitates. And the current main audience for SQD has been dApp builders who need indexing. He further highlighted that more have been migrating their infra from the Graph, thanks to SQD’s speed and flexibility.
A few dApps Dmitry is very excited about are Railgun, who rely on SQD’s indexing of holistic onchain data to provide a privacy solution to using Web3 and Decentraland.
“Decentraland is this OG project with two cycles behind them. There’ve been some big Metaverse and NFT hypes followed by long winters. The team continued to build and eventually, it’ll be those teams pushing the industry forward. That’s why I’m very excited that they are migrating their infrastructure to SQD.”
SQD’s “end-game”
In the end, it’s not just about providing a better indexing solution for current dApp builders. For SQD Co-founder, the big vision is magnitudes larger than that. He explains that the big idea behind SQD is that you need a powerful way to extract raw data at scale. Eventually you won’t need one indexer per user, but all you need is an indexer producing the data and countless endpoints from where it can be consumed.
How could that work? Not with the current Graph design. The data will need to be much closer to the user. One technology that might play a big role in that is SQLite. Leveraging it, the data could be directly on the client, enabling private data while also making it easy to replicate.
Replication could be combined with AVS to maintain Web3 values and resilience. Imagine Nodes from networks like Eigenlayer spinning up replications on demand. Overall, this allows the separation of storage and computing, which has been part of the SQD thesis from the start.
Taking on Web2
Web2 has very successfully separated compute and storage. And still, Dmitry foresees a future in which using SQD for data access could have a significantly lower cost than using existing Web2 solutions. That’s because SQD taps into a huge retail hardware market where the power of the network scales with nodes.
Why we’re still alive
It’s unclear what the person asking was really on about, but in short, SQD is still alive because we continue building on our mission regardless of web3 vibes or the token price.
On what happens if $SQD becomes so valuable, being a worker node becomes a huge investment
If the price of the SQD token increases so sharply that no one can afford to run a node anymore, that would be negative for the network. Still, it’s important to balance security, rewards, and requirements.
It’s worth pointing out that current rewards flow from a fixed reward pool, and the model will be updated in two years. By then, 20% APR might be too much for the resources required. Further, Dmitry points out that it’s quite common that running one node in a blockchain is expensive, see Solana or Ethereum. However, we then saw an increase in liquid staking protocols making it more accessible. In theory, it’s pretty simple to create that for SQD.
To further optimize, requirements could be more flexible in terms of the bonds workers have to provide. The more they bond, the more they will potentially earn, but they also have to commit more hardware.
For more in-depth on current rewards calculation, go here.
Any big partners?
Yes, the type that requires signing an NDA from us. Still, SQD is going heavily into the enterprise market and has already built partnerships with Google Cloud and Deutsche Telekom. An interesting observation Dmitry mentioned was that the flexibility makes SQD quite attractive as it allows these enterprises to experiment and then deploy in their own enterprise cloud, all without vendor lock-in.
dApps only possible once the game plan has been executed?
Dmitry highlights two use cases in particular: privacy enabled by indexing on the client, which unlocks new use cases, and client-side indexing, which could, for example, provide a responsive mobile app that shows an AI-customized Farcaster feed to the user.
Most excited about short-term?
Gateway 2.0 is part of our bigger mission to replace how dApps access data from the chain. In short, there will be no more RPC for data access.
For more questions, please ask away on the Discord Server.