What is The Graph (GRT) crypto and how does it work?

The Graph crypto refers to a protocol that indexes data from blockchains and serves it to apps, plus its token, GRT. Blockchains store data in a way that is slow to search, so most dapps need a separate service to answer questions like "show me this wallet's trades". The Graph aims to provide that service as an open network instead of a single company's servers.

What is The Graph crypto?

The Graph Network went live on Ethereum mainnet on December 17, 2020, describing itself as a global, searchable index of blockchain data. Yaniv Tal was named as project lead and co-founder. At launch, apps such as Uniswap, Curve and Decentraland were already using it.

The core product is the subgraph. A developer writes a subgraph that tells the network which contracts to watch and how to organize their data, then publishes it. Anyone can query it with GraphQL, a common query language. The project says it now supports more than 60 networks and has added other data products alongside subgraphs.

How does GRT crypto work?

According to The Graph's tokenomics docs, the network has four main participants:

• Indexers run the servers that store and serve subgraph data. They must stake at least 100,000 GRT and earn query fees and indexing rewards. Part of their stake can be slashed for bad behavior.
• Delegators lend GRT to Indexers without running hardware and earn a share of their rewards. Withdrawing takes a 28-epoch unbonding period, about 26 days.
• Curators put GRT behind subgraphs they think are useful, signaling which ones Indexers should prioritize, and earn part of future query fees.
• Developers build subgraphs and pay GRT to query them.

This is a form of staking, but rewards depend on the work done for the data market, not only on locking tokens.

What is the GRT crypto coin's supply?

GRT started with a supply of 10 billion tokens. New issuance targets 3% a year, paid to Indexers as rewards. Several fees are burned: a 0.5% tax on delegation, a 1% tax on curation and 1% of query fees, along with slashed amounts. The docs say about 1% of supply is burned each year. GRT exists both on Ethereum mainnet and on Arbitrum, an Ethereum layer 2 network.

What is The Graph crypto AI angle?

The Graph has started packaging its data for AI tools. Its documentation describes two Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that connect to AI assistants and coding tools. The Subgraph MCP lets a language model look up subgraphs, read their schemas and run queries. The Token API MCP lets a model fetch token information, wallet balances, transfer histories and top holders through ordinary prompts.

In practice this means an AI agent can answer onchain questions using The Graph's indexes rather than reading raw blockchain data. As of October 2026 these tools sit alongside the core subgraph service rather than replacing it.