Discovering The Google Of Blockchain With Tegan Kline, Co-Founder and Business Lead At Edge & Node - Ep. 39

Bobby Ong [00:00:00] : 
Welcome to the CoinGecko podcast. I'm your host, Bobby Ong. Each week we will be interviewing someone from the blockchain industry to learn more about this fast moving crypto currency economy. If this is your first time listening, then thanks for coming. The CoinGecko podcast is produced each week to help you stay ahead of the curve. Show notes can be found at podcast.coingecko.com. I highly encourage you to join our newsletter, where we send out top news in the crypto industry every Monday to Friday. Come back often and feel free to add the podcast to your favorite RSS feed or iTunes. You can also follow us on Twitter and Telegram at CoinGecko. 

Hey guys, welcome to the CoinGecko podcast. For today's episode, we have Tegan Kline, co-founder and business lead at Edge & Node, working on The Graph. If you're watching this on YouTube, we at CoinGecko really appreciate it if you hit the like and subscribe button below. And yeah, before we start this podcast, here's a little bit about Tegan. So I've mentioned Tegan's the co-founder and business lead at Edge & Node, the initial team behind The Graph. The Graph is an indexing and query protocol organizing the world's open blockchain data and making open data public good. Tegan was also formally International BD Manager and OXT Relations Lead for Orchid. Tegan successfully helped to launch the Orchid protocol at a $400 million valuation on Coinbase. Welcome to the CoinGecko podcast, Tegan! 

Tegan Kline [00:01:22] : 
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited about our conversation today. 

Bobby Ong [00:01:26]: 
Likewise, super excited to have you on the show. So yeah, let's get into it Tegan. I guess without getting too technical, right? So reckon if you can give us like a simple explanation of what The Graph is and why is it needed in the crypto space? 

Tegan Kline [00:01:42]: 
Yeah, absolutely. So The Graph is integral infrastructure for the decentralized web, which we call Web3, and The Graph helps to organize blockchain data so that developers can easily access that data and serve that data to their users. And so, you know, anything in the blockchain space, most things kind of touch The Graph now, but if they don't touch The Graph now, they likely will in the future because The Graph is there to support every network. So right now The Graph supports many different networks, like Layer 1, like Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, Moonbeam, Clover. We're working on integrations for NEAR, Solana and Polkadot. So those will be coming soon, but also like Layer 2 blockchains, like Arbitrum and soon Optimism. And then sidechains like Polygon, Oracle networks like Chainlink, of course. And then storage networks like IPFS. So really wherever developers go, The Graph will be. And I know it's summer, it's kind of the summer of scaling Ethereum. And so The Graph is there to help those projects that are helping to scale Ethereum, but also The Graph is helping to decentralize Ethereum and really decentralize other blockchains that The Graph is integrated with. So that developers can have kind of redundant infrastructure and they know that that infrastructure is always there for them. And also The Graph helps to kind of lower the barrier to entry so that more developers can come in and build in the blockchain space. 

Bobby Ong [00:03:08]: 
Wow, I mean, you guys started on Ethereum and when you talk about scaling onto all the different blockchains, you guys are definitely scaling out onto all these different chains. It must be a lot of work. Wow. But yeah, I mean, I definitely agree. Getting data on a blockchain is difficult for many developers. We at CoinGecko rely on The Graph to capture all of this data. When decentralized exchanges, such as Uniswap was kind of getting popular, last year in the early stages of DeFi summer, we were trying really hard to find ways how to index audit and get the price and volume for all these tokens traded on Uniswap and we searched high and low for a solution, and eventually we found out about The Graph and we use a subgraph and that enabled us to kind of have all these long tier of Uniswap tokens added onto CoinGecko, and we've used so many subgraphs from you guys for the Curve, SushiSwap, and so on and, they all enabled us to aggregate. So yeah, we at CoinGecko definitely very happy with what we use from you guys. Yeah. 

Tegan Kline [00:04:05]: 
It's so great to hear that. And I think within The Graph ecosystem, you have subgraphs and those subgraphs are open APIs, and it's so different than like decentralized internet where you have like LinkedIn or Facebook, where those APIs are closed. And so like a CoinGecko, wouldn't be able to pull that data, even though that's all of our data as users. Facebook kind of has this walled garden around it. And so that's what The Graph is focused on is kind of making that open data public good. As you mentioned at the beginning, so that we have these Lego building blocks so that everyone in the ecosystem can benefit from that technology and also innovate with that data.

Bobby Ong [00:04:41]: 
Yeah, without The Graph, we have to run an indexer node and index all these data on Ethereum and trying to make sense of it. That was a real pain. Because when we spoke to all the teams and they said, I mean, they were focused on getting the app and when we want the data, they say, "We used to getting API from central exchanges and just like, get an API and this, and all the answers that we got was just get it from the blockchain. Just read it yourself and it was, oh, that was really painful, but we found out from you guys. So yeah, coming back to you Tegan, would like to hear, I mean, you used to sort of work in banking, and then you kind of made the switch from tradfi to crypto, right. So curious to hear how and why do you make the switch?

Tegan Kline [00:05:17]: 
Yeah, absolutely. So I guess the decision comes back to like when and why did I decide to go into finance? And I accepted a full scholarship to a finance school and I, as an overachiever, I'm like, well, I need to get to the top of banking. And so what is the top of banking? And so I went into investment banking at Bank of America, which is a [inaudible] bank. From there I moved over to sales and trading at Barclays. And during my time in banking, I was constantly volunteering because I didn't feel like my passion was within banking, as you can probably imagine, but I didn't know what my passion was in. I was always kind of searching for it. And it was when I learned about Ethereum that I finally found something I was passionate about, and I really just saw the opportunity to create a new internet, to create a new financial system, and so I dove deep into the crypto space. I joined Orchid. I got a lot of really great experience, kind of leading OFC relations and getting to know a lot of the investors on the Orchid cap table, but also doing business development. I think I traveled to over 26 different countries in less than a year time while I was at Orchid and so. It was really great to just kind of dive in to the crypto culture, which is very, very different than banking culture. And yeah, it just, it really, really feel like I've kind of found my place and my home in the crypto space and I'm grateful that I was able to kind of bring the experience and helping to launch Orchid to The Graph ecosystem. And now I have a career within The Graph ecosystem, you know, for the next 10 plus years, which I haven't committed to anything for that long, like four years max for college, right. Nothing, nothing that long, but yeah, I'm grateful to kind of have found a home in The Graph space, in The Graph ecosystem. And that's really in the Web3 space because The Graph touches everything, like I mentioned. So, so many challenges, so many things to kind of constantly learn and absorb. 

Bobby Ong [00:07:08]: 
It's interesting how you brought up, like, being overachiever. I mean, I kind of relate a lot of the things that you said just now, like kind of go to college and then you want to overachieve, and everybody in my class, my cohort was like kind of gunning to get the IB job, the investment banking job in Goldman, in JP and all those places. And I was like, it's kind of a big race to get it. But I didn't apply to any of these banks. It didn't really feel like the right thing for me to do, but I knew that a lot of my classmates were doing it. And then I think kind of the same, like, you don't really know what you want to do until kind of I discovered Bitcoin and Ethereum back then, and then it feels like, there's like a calling I suppose, if you know what I mean. And over the years, started to build a career for yourself in this industry, which is really interesting, I would say. 

Tegan Kline [00:07:45]:
 Cool! Yeah, you are more wise, more wise than me. 

Bobby Ong [00:07:49]: 
One of the taglines used for The Graph is the Google of Web3. So, I mean, it's a big world, right? Google is obviously a large tech company. How do you see, or how do you think The Graph can become the Google of Web3? 

Tegan Kline [00:08:04]: 
Yeah. So what Google does is it indexes all of the world's information and data, and The Graph is indexing all of the world's blockchain on-chain data. And so in that sense, The Graph is similar to Google in indexing all of the world's blockchain information, but it is a good point. Google is a really large company and there are many elements to Google, aside from just indexing and querying. And I think those will likely come in the blockchain space over time. And that's really why Edge & Node is there to kind of solidify that, so that blockchains become the future of the internet quickly. And obviously the business model of The Graph is much different than Google. Google's business model is to sell ads. And that's what those walled gardens kind of incentivized, right. They have a monopoly on all of that data. And so they're probably going to be unlikely to open that data. But in the blockchain space, we're kind of putting new data out into the world. And I foresee that blockchain will become the future of the internet because this model of making us the product is not what the internet was created for. And so I hope that with blockchain technology and in Web3, we can kind of get to a more pure version of the internet, or I guess maybe the version of the internet that we had hoped at the beginning of the internet, it would turn into.

Bobby Ong [00:09:17]: 
And you, you are one of the co-founder at Edge & Node, which is the initial team behind the launch of The Graph. So I guess for many people, they might be curious, like what's the relationship between Edge & Node and kind of the role of the company after the launch of The Graph protocol?

Tegan Kline [00:09:33]: 
Yeah. So Edge & Node is now one of three core developers within The Graph ecosystem. There's also StreamingFast and Figment, which we recently invited into The Graph family. And so that's great that so many developing minds are focused on The Graph protocol for the long-term feature that we have ahead of us. But I do notice really committed to creating kind of a vibrant, decentralized future. Our team is now over 40 people. And so there's five co-founders. There's Yaniv Tal, who's our CEO, Brandon Ramirez, who is our research lead. He put a lot of thought into The Graph token economics. He's super brilliant. And then there's Jannis, of course. He's our brilliant engineering lead. So Yaniv, Brandon and Jannis are all the original co-founders of The Graph. And then there's Carl, who's also a co-founder with us at Edge & Node and he is an amazing designer. And so it's really nice kind of having all of us with such different skill sets and really kind of owning those skillsets. It's really like yin and yang across the board. And then just the team is incredible. Like I've never seen anyone execute like, the Edge & Node team. And I'm used to kind of being like the one that cares the most. And I kind of have to get everyone else to care, and it's not like that within Edge & Node. Everyone just really cares. Everyone executes really flawlessly and everyone's wearing a lot of hats. So it's really great to kind of be around like-minded people. And I think we're also very much like mission and passion focused. And Edge & Node has kind of skillsets, so a lot of engineering talent including from like MuleSoft, Microsoft, HP as well, I believe. And MuleSoft was actually acquired by Salesforce and I just kind of find it ironic because Salesforce was really the first to really own the SAS market, right. 

A lot of people were like, why are you buying up all the inventory and selling subscriptions, like this isn't going to work. And then Salesforce turned that into over $200 billion industry. And I view like tokens as the next evolution of the business model. So it's great that, you know, so many people within Edge & Node come from MuleSoft and Salesforce. But, yeah, we're really just focused on solidifying the Web3 stack. We have a researcher who joined us from Google. He's focused on everything in Web3 and kind of we're putting together what that stack looks like, so that we can kind of get to this future more quickly. If you look back at the internet, like creating a website was so difficult. You'd have huge teams. You'd be sending so much money, and now you can create a website with one click. And I think we'll get to the same space within the dApp space, but we need some time and we need to really solidify that stack. That's what Edge & Node is focused on. 

Bobby Ong [00:12:07]: 
Sounds good. I'm curious, right. So you guys launched the Mainnet, The Graph launches Mainnet in December, 2020. So we're looking about like eight, nine months since the launch right now. So you guys have some interesting stats of the network that you can share with our listeners? 

Tegan Kline [00:12:22]: 
Yeah, absolutely. So many statistics [inaudible]. So, right now it's important to say that there's two kind of versions. So there's the hosted service, which is always kind of an intermediary step before we get to the decentralized network. And so the hosted service there's over 20,000 developers who have built over 18,000 subgraphs and that hosted service has done over 135 billion lifetime queries. And in the month of May alone, and that was over 18 months. In the month of May alone, the hosted service did 25 billion queries. So that just shows you like parabolic growth, not just within The Graph, but it's really a proxy for the growth on Ethereum and the blockchain space. But as you mentioned, the launch of the decentralized network, and so now we're kind of putting the hosted service in their rear view mirror a bit and focusing on the decentralized network. And so since the product launch in July, which was early last month, they have gone from eight subgraphs on the network to over 134 subgraphs on the network, which is a huge percentage of around like 1600% increase, which is great to see because now it's permissionless and anyone can migrate their subgraph from that hosted service to the decentralized network.

There's also over 150 different indexers on The Graph network. And I kind of think of each of them is like their own little Google. And so Web2 has one Google and The Graph network has over 150. And then there's over 6,000 delegators that are delegating to those indexers to earn passive income and help secure the network. And then curation also launched with that product launch in July. And there's over 2000 curators on The Graph network, helping the index figure out which subgraph they want to index on. And I actually think a lot of the CoinGecko audience would make amazing curators because you have to have the skillset of a good trader or good investor, because you're looking for the new cool subgraphs that come out. You're minting signal on a bonding curves. That means like the earlier you are to those projects, the likely better you do so long as they are quality subgraphs that are used. And then of course you all would make a great curator as well, and I hope you are curating. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. So those are the kinds of some of the numbers. There's also over 3.1 billion GRT staked in the network currently. That's 31% of the total supply, so that number keeps increasing as well. So that's great. 

Bobby Ong [00:14:45]: 
So you sort of mentioned a few interesting roles. Curator, indexer and delegator. And I'm sure some of our listeners here would be interested in playing a role because obviously these roles get rewarded pretty well, I would say as well, from what I saw the numbers. Explain a little bit more to those who may not be familiar, what curators, indexers, delegators, and who are most suited to be one of these roles, I supposed. 

Tegan Kline [00:15:08]: 
Yeah, absolutely. So those three roles that you mentioned are the three roles where you can earn GRT in the network. And so delegation is the least technical role. Anyone can do it. The hardest part about delegating is figuring out which index that you want to delegate to. Each one has their own economics. Each indexer is kind of competing for query fees by serving queries quickly and efficiently. And so you wanted to use the indexer that's serving queries quickly and efficiently, but also that's willing to share a larger amount of those queries with you. And so it's really passive income, but you're also taking a role in the network and helping to secure the network. And you're also helping indexers get a larger stake, which is really important, and they're all very grateful for that. Indexers are doing the heavy lifting. They're really the backbone of the future of the internet. They're serving those queries. They're indexing that data they're choosing which subgraphs they want to index. And so if you're, if you love dev ops and you're quite technical, you would make a great indexer. And then, there are the curators, as I mentioned. I like to call them open data alpha finders, because that's really what they're doing. They're looking for the alpha on The Graph network. And as these subgraphs migrate over, they're paying attention and they are looking at those subgraphs figuring out, okay, is this really from the team that they say there are. They're checking Twitter, they're doing their due diligence. And then they're minting signal on that bonding curve. And then that's what helps the indexers identify which subgraph to stake upon. So an example is like you could launch a CoinGecko subgraph, and I could launch a subgraph called CoinGecko. And so how would the indexes know which one to index on? And so it would be the curator's job to say, "Hey, Bobby's the legit subgraph. Don't index on Tegan's. Index on Bobby's. And then an indexer would stake on yours and start getting to work on your subgraph. 

Bobby Ong [00:17:02]: 
Interesting. Very helpful and underlying these three different roles kind of the GRT token, right, I suppose that's where it takes on a lot of this functionality. So I think it's a good segway to see what's kind of the role of GRT token to tie in the entire The Graph ecosystem. 

Tegan Kline [00:17:18]: Yeah, absolutely. So The Graph is a work utility token, and so those three roles earn GRT in the ecosystem. And then the dApp developers, many of them that are on the network now have committed to paying for query fees on behalf of their users to reduce friction for the time being. But I do think that there will be a learning curve. Also products will launch, which will allow users the autonomy to be able to pay for query fees on their own, kind of similar to how we use gas costs in Ethereum, for example. And you could also envision that a subgraph developer build into their protocol, the cost of the query fees. I think we'll see a lot of that in the future as well. So I'm really excited for what that holds, but yes, the incentive structure in The Graph ecosystem is quite involved and there are different mechanisms and levers. And for example, unlike Cosmos, where you can get slash as a delegator. In The Graph ecosystem, there's no slashing, if you're a delegator. If the indexer misbehaves, the indexer can be slashed, but not the delegator, but there is a 28 day thawing period. And so you can't just switch from one delegator to another. And the reason for that is if I could switch, I could just look at when the indexers are closing their rewards, I could take those rewards. And then within 28 days, I could move to the next indexer. That's about to close and you could game the system. And so that's kind of one of the, one of the mechanisms, but there are many. There's also a limited amount of stake. So each indexer can only take a certain amount of delegation rewards. You can't have like only a few GRT and then take billions of GRT in delegation. So it's a really cool protocol. It's a really complex protocol. So I invite the listeners to really, really dive in. 

Bobby Ong [00:19:04]: 
Yeah, I see that that's a lot of nuances with regards to GRT. It's not the simplest tokenomics to follow, to understand. But I guess that's where the opportunity is, right? That's the alpha or like that's like where if you've got a chance to earn all these GRT. I keep telling all my friends, like, guys, if you want to be rich and all, like crypto is the place to be. There's just so many ways, so many opportunities to make so much money, like if you want to, but it's not easy. You've got to spend the time to learn it. So most people don't want to spend the time. They just want free money landing on the lap, but you know, you got to take the time and effort to understand and find your niche, find your role in how do you want to help to play and decentralize the future of blockchain. That's how you get rewarded, I suppose. Yeah. 

Tegan Kline [00:19:42]: 
Exactly. And I think we're shifting the way you work, like you can now work for many different protocols. You can be a liquidity provider on Uniswap, a delegator on The Graph and you can earn passive income that could potentially be more than what you're earning in your day job currently. And I think that's the power of peer-to-peer protocols because there's no one at the center taking all the money that you should be earning for doing all the work they're doing. And now within the crypto space, you can actually get compensated commensurate to the value that you're bringing so long as it's a legitimate protocol, that's bringing true value to the ecosystem. And that token economics are thought out and it's not like you know a centralized wolf in a decentralized sheep's clothing, for example. But yeah, I think it's really exciting and there's so much opportunity for so many people that have might have been left out of the previous financial system or economy to come in and really put in the work and get rewarded.

Bobby Ong [00:20:36]: 
I always like to tell people that in a Web2 world you have companies like Uber and Airbnb, who's became giants by Facebook, Google, and so on. Uber, Airbnb became giants by themselves, but they sort of use your work and your contribution and kind of centralize all the profits for their shareholders. And you don't get a single cent, whereas in crypto, you contribute to the growth of the network and you get in the upside as well, which is a more fair future, I suppose. Yeah. 

Tegan Kline [00:21:04]: 
Yeah, absolutely. 

Bobby Ong [00:21:05]: 
Earlier you sort of mentioned that The Graph started out by hosting a bunch of subgraphs in a centralized manner. And the plan is to sort of decentralize the hosting of this subgraph. I guess the decentralization goes to their indexer? And what do they need to do? Do they need to run like a server or is it kind of like, IPFS? And I'm just curious, how is this decentralized? I think you kind of mentioned briefly, but how's the decentralization process coming along?

Tegan Kline [00:21:29]: 
Yeah, absolutely. So the hosted service was always kind of the temporary step so that developers could come in, they could start building subgraphs. We could iterate on the product. There was a lot of that iteration at the beginning of The Graph ecosystem. And then we kind of saw this parabolic growth take over on the hosted service when the documentation got better, when the demos got better, when the product got better. And now the decentralized network, and in that timeframe, we were focused on building the decentralized network. The idea of The Graph started four years ago. So it really has been a long process and a long journey to get to where we are today. And this is really only the beginning. You know, Ethereum is six years old. The Graph is four years old. The launch of the decentralized network is only what, eight months old or so. And so, yeah, it's coming along really well. We started kind of bootstrapping the supply back in December. So we really started with the indexers and the delegators on the decentralized network. We grew that up, and then in July we launched the subgraphs studio and the graphic score, which allowed for curation to go live. 

So then curators started coming on and it also allowed for the permissionless version of that network. So the hosted server still exists today. We will be deprecating it after some time, but we want to make sure we give everyone enough time to migrate over, to feel comfortable. And so we've already seen, as I mentioned, 134 of those subgraphs migrate over. And the decentralized network, it's all on those indexers, and those are all third parties. So The Graph is not running an indexer node on the network and the network has actually experienced no downtime thus far, it's working as we all envisioned it to work, which is great because The Graph's hosted service. I mean, anytime you have a centralized point of failure, you're going to see downtime. And that is why we've been so focused on decentralization. And so just like Bitcoin and Ethereum have never gone down because they're decentralized, there's redundancy. If one index or node stops working, there are a ton of other indexers to pick up the slack for those different subgraphs. So yes, it's going great, but so much more to come and I'm excited to see new developers come and spin up some graphs directly on the decentralized network. Perhaps some that didn't want to use the hosted version of The Graph. 

Bobby Ong [00:23:44]: 
And DeFi started out mainly on Ethereum, but I think the interesting thing for me observing as well this year was how DeFi grown from just purely being on Ethereum to being active on Binance Smart Chain, and then now on Polygon. And then we start seeing Arbitrum, Optimism and Phantom, xDAI, and it's like Solana and all these different chains. So what do you think of this rise of the multi-chain crypto ecosystem and how are you guys thinking of this future?

Tegan Kline [00:24:13]: 
Yeah, absolutely. So I think The Graph has kind of been thought leaders from the early days, right, four years ago saying decentralization is the future, Web3 is actually cool. And everyone's like, what are you talking about, just build it in a centralized way. And like, let's get a move in. And The Graph kind of did some leeway with multi-blockchain. So in January it was still kind of contrarian to say, you know, we believe in a multi-blockchain future. But we did and we started those integrations back then. And I think that it is just naturally where the future should go. Part of, I know as humans, we tend to be very tribal and we see that with like the Bitcoin maximalist and Ethereum maximalist. And I think each of those maximalists play a very important role in the ecosystem, like the Bitcoin maximalist hold our values strong. And so I think that it's good to kinda unite together and it's great to see so many chains going EVM compatible. Projects like Connects coming up to help with interoperability. The Graph helping with interoperability at the indexing inquiry layers that we can see a holistic view of all of the data across all of the chains. I think it's so important, and I think as an ecosystem we need to unite together because there are huge centralized organizations that we need to focus on as opposed to inviting. So I think it's a step in the right direction. 

Bobby Ong [00:25:30]: 
Yeah, I definitely agree. And I never thought of it until recently as well, but this growth of this multi-chain future is needed because Ethereum by itself, cannot handle the growth, the demand for all this exchange and [inquiring] that happens on one chain. There's just so much data that can be added to one chain, but Ethereum can't support it and gas fees go up, and because the price became so high that a lot of people got priced out of Ethereum. So I think with the rise of Polygon, and BSC, and all the other EVM chain, like we are creating new capacity and inviting new guys to come and experience DeFi for the first time, which they will have been priced out if, I mean, just relying on Ethereum could be a bit too slow, I suppose. You just need solutions right now.

Tegan Kline [00:26:11]: 
Yeah, absolutely. And I think Ethereum will always kind of play that security role, but maybe not everything needs that much security. And so, and it's also kind of exciting to see Solana get traction and bring in kind of the traditional finance space into the blockchain space. So yeah, I think there's room for all of it. And I just focus on kind of the values that I hold, which is like decentralized open-source permissionless technology. But even with that, you know, there's room for less centralized or less decentralized players as well.

Bobby Ong [00:26:38]: 
Yeah. And what do you say would be some of the main plans for The Graph or maybe Edge & Node, I suppose, for the second half of 2021, maybe next year 2022 as well? 

Tegan Kline [00:26:49] : 
Yeah. So we're really focused on adding more networks, like I mentioned. 

Bobby Ong [00:26:52]: 
Oh, there's so many.

Tegan Kline [00:26:54] : 
[inaudible] very soon. So that'll be an announcement coming out and then we'll be there at Optimism mainnet launch. But just really kind of growing the mindshare about Web3 and educating everyone across the ecosystem. I know that crypto can sometimes get a bad rep because there are some centralized wolfs in decentralized sheep clothing that are out to kind of get the wrong things out of the space. But there are true builders in this space and we are really kind of paving the way for the future. So just kind of trying to be an example in that. And also like you mentioned, there's so many ways to make so much money in the crypto space, but I think sometimes people see that and they feel that pressure and then they sacrifice the long-term for the short-term. And so I really tried to never sacrifice the short-term for the long-term. I'm very long-term focused. And so just kind of trying to hold that bar and the space and be a good example, I guess. And there's just so much research that's being done. We have a zero knowledge researcher on the team. And so we will have some exciting innovations around privacy that we'll announce soon, but yeah, so much coming up. It's really exciting and like I said, wherever developers go, The Graph will be. 

Bobby Ong [00:28:04]: 
It's interesting. I mean like, launching on all these EVM chains is one thing. I mean, there's some work involved, but launching on non-EVM compatible chains like Solana pretty sure that's a lot of work involved in the dApps to kind of do all this work.

Tegan Kline [00:28:18]: 
I'm not sure if you saw, but the foundation actually allocated to Core Dev grants. The first was to a StreamingFast. It was a $60 million grant. So they've actually, it's kind of like a decentralized exit or a decentralized M&A. They no longer have their investors. They no longer are going to like launch a competing project and they have bought fully into The Graph's mission, which is really what their mission to begin with. So it's great to kind of welcome them into The Graph family and be building together. There's some of the few people in the entire world, I would say that have the experience that they have in improving inducting speeds. And they're really great like with Binance Smart Chain, for example, [inaudible]. They're really helping a lot with some of those initiatives. And then the foundation also allocated 80 million GRT to Figment and a similar thing happened, but it's for their data hub team, which the data hub was kind of a competing project. And now they fully deprecated that and those 10 engineers and npms are focused on The Graph. So it's just exciting to me. Like nothing centralized will ever be able to compete with a decentralized protocol. And I think protocols will always win. So I'm excited to see what that future holds and just the level of decentralization that some of those grants provided. 

Bobby Ong [00:29:36]:
Cool. Anything else that I should sort of ask you that we haven't really covered at this point in time yet?

Tegan Kline [00:29:43]: 
I don't think so, but we are hiring a ton. If anyone is listening, excited to potentially join this mission, we invite you to apply, but also check out the roles. There's a place for everyone in The Graph ecosystem and every skillset is needed. If you're not technical, there are so many business skillset that we need in this space, and we're creating a new internet. We're creating a new financial system and we need all voices around the table. So I hope everyone feels kind of included in this movement. 

Bobby Ong [00:30:11]: 
I definitely agree. And if you're listening and you're not working full-time in crypto yet, get yourself into crypto. There's just so much alpha in the space like we need you and you got to come into the space, as well because the space is just a hiring crunch and everyone's really finding it really hard to hire good talent. So we welcome all of you to sort of apply to The Graph or anywhere else.

Tegan Kline [00:30:30]: 
Yeah, absolutely. 

Bobby Ong [00:30:32]: 
Thank you very much, Tegan for taking the time and talking about The Graph. I think it's been a very insightful conversation for the past half an hour or so. Really appreciate your time.

Tegan Kline [00:30:43]: 
Thank you so much for hosting me. This is great, and we'd love to do a followup at some point in the future. 

Bobby Ong [00:30:47]: 
Definitely. Thank you. 

All right. That wraps up the show. Thank you for listening to the CoinGecko podcast with Bobby. If you like our show and want to know more, check out podcast.coingecko.com or please leave us a review on iTunes. If you have any feedback, do drop us an email at hello@coingecko.com. Join us for more next week. See ya. 

Disclaimer [00:31:09]: 
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