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Curvance Cut Indexing Time From Days To Minutes With SQD

mojo

• 3 min read

Curvance is building a lending protocol designed for high leverage without compromising lender security - combining productive collateral mechanics with a liquidation framework engineered for speed.

They’re live on Monad today (with Ethereum planned next), and like any serious DeFi protocol, they needed a data provider they could rely on.

Their first indexing setup used The Graph, but catch-up times and RPC load became a bottleneck.

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The Problem

Curvance’s goal was clear: tap into on-chain user activity and reward users, partners, and referrals based on how they interact with the protocol - so incentives reflect reality and keep users engaging.

But the approach they started with (The Graph) created compounding pain:

  • Hosted limits showed up fast, and the costs were a turn-off at their scale.
  • Self-hosting became a maintenance grind with technical limitations that made it “nearly impossible to maintain.”
  • Indexing was too slow and too RPC-hungry for the amount of data they needed.
  • On Monad - where blocks resolve quickly - their subgraph node could take 3-5 days to catch up to the latest block.

That last point is the most important. If your chain moves fast but your indexer moves slow, you have a backlog.

And when you’re building features like rewards, referrals, and partner incentives, being days behind is not an option.

Why Curvance Chose SQD

Curvance moved to SQD because they needed an indexing stack that was able to work under real protocol scale, without punishing them for growth.

The decision came down to three things:

1) Speed

Curvance needed indexing that could actually keep up with Monad. That was the deciding factor.

“The numbers are night and day.” — Curvance

2) Efficiency

With The Graph, the amount of RPC calls required to index their dataset was taking too long and costing too much. They needed a system that wouldn’t exhaust their endpoints - especially as indexing requirements expanded.

3) Flexibility

Curvance has custom business requirements that require being hands-on in code. SQD’s open, modular architecture gave them the control to implement what they needed.

Bonus: multi-contract and cross-chain readiness

Curvance has a large number of contracts to index and is building toward a cross-chain future. Their indexing solution needed to support that from the start. Enter SQD.

Integration

Curvance runs a self-hosted SQD container as their ETL layer, then uses the indexed data in backend APIs and cron jobs for tracking + rewarding user activity within the platform.

They also made a targeted customization so SQD could track user referral data alongside on-chain activity - ensuring rewards are correctly attributed and incentives stay tight.

Migration from The Graph was smooth, because the setup was familiar - and Curvance called out SQD support engineers as a major accelerant throughout the process.

“Migration and integration was very seamless.” - Curvance

Results

Curvance shared two headline improvements after switching from The Graph to SQD:

1) RPC calls dropped

  • The Graph: ~1,000,000 RPC calls/day
  • SQD: ~270,000 RPC calls/day

That’s ~73% fewer RPC calls (about 3.7x fewer calls overall)

2) Catch-up time went from days to minutes

  • The Graph: 3–5 days to catch up to the latest Monad block
  • SQD: a few minutes

On a fast chain, this is the ultimate difference and where the team mentioned it was 'night and day'.

“On The Graph, it would take a few days for the subgraph node to catch up… with SQD this happens in a matter of minutes.” - Curvance

What This Unlocks for Curvance

With SQD, Curvance can reliably:

  • Track on-chain activity with enough freshness to power real incentives
  • Reward users and referrals accurately (and at scale)
  • Add new indexed data without dragging development velocity
  • Scale indexing as the protocol expands (and as they move toward additional chains)

SQD Support

Curvance described SQD support as “top in class” - fast responses, hands-on help, and quick turnaround even when requesting new features. That matters because in crypto, time-to-shipping is crucial.

When infra and support are slow, everything is slow. As well as a faster indexer, they had a partner that kept momentum high.

“The SQD team has been top in class when it comes to support.” - Curvance

Conclusion: if The Graph can’t keep up, your product can’t either

Curvance’s experience is a clean example of what happens when indexing infrastructure is built for a world where chains are fast and users expect real-time feedback.

Curvance needed speed, efficiency, and flexibility.

With SQD they received:

  • 73% fewer RPC calls
  • Days-behind indexing replaced by minutes
  • A modular stack they could adapt to their protocol’s real needs
“They have delivered on everything we’ve asked for and more. It’s been the best decision when it came to our indexing needs.” - Curvance

If you are building on Monad and would like to find out how we could help your project, feel free to reach our to Konstantin our Partnership Lead via k.kalinin@sqd.ai or Telegram @xyz_konstantin.