The Graph: 20+ DeFi subgraphs and the Subgraph Toolkit
The Graph indexes blockchain data so dApp developers can query it with GraphQL, but every protocol needs its own subgraph, and writing one well takes protocol-specific knowledge most teams lack. Protofire has built subgraphs in The Graph ecosystem since 2019: we authored and open-sourced subgraphs for protocols including Maker, Curve, Compound governance, UMA, and Lens, and published the Subgraph Toolkit and dev kit others reuse.
The infrastructure served 18M+ subgraph queries a day across 15+ networks, all public in the Protofire GitHub org.
“Blockchains store data block by block, the wrong shape for an application.”
Why dApp teams need a subgraph before they can query their own protocol
Blockchains store data block by block, the wrong shape for an application. A dApp or governance UI cannot read a user's positions or open proposals from raw chain state without reconstructing it. A subgraph fixes this: it defines which events matter, how to transform them, and what schema to expose over GraphQL for The Graph's indexers to serve.
Why writing a good subgraph is protocol-specific work
But a subgraph is code, not boilerplate. It maps a protocol's exact event signatures to entities and stays correct as new contracts ship. Get the mapping wrong and the dApp reads bad data with no error, so a protocol like Maker, Curve, or Compound needs someone who understands both The Graph's indexing model and its contract design.
How Protofire built subgraphs and tooling for The Graph
Protofire started contributing to The Graph ecosystem in 2019 and built subgraphs directly for major protocols. Verified as authored in the Protofire org, not forked from an upstream: the Maker Protocol subgraph, Curve, Compound governance, UMA, and Lens, and others across DeFi and Web3.
Each encodes that protocol's event and entity model so its dApp can query positions, history, and governance state. Where Protofire built on an existing upstream instead of authoring from scratch, that work lives as a fork and is not counted above.
Beyond individual subgraphs, Protofire built reusable tooling. The Subgraph Toolkit is an open-source collection of helpers for subgraph development, published on npm as `@protofire/subgraph-toolkit` (downloaded tens of thousands of times, peaking above 20,000 in a single year), followed by a subgraph dev kit for scaffolding new subgraphs. Other teams bootstrap their own subgraphs from it instead of writing the helpers from scratch.
Protofire ran subgraph indexing and querying on Kubernetes-based clusters with Terraform and CI/CD, the node infrastructure needed to deploy and serve subgraphs across multiple networks reliably. Across the engagement that infrastructure served 18M+ subgraph queries a day across 15+ networks, query-response time was reduced by about 92% (from roughly 4.2 seconds to about 0.3 seconds), and new subgraphs typically shipped in about 10 days instead of the 6 to 8 weeks a from-scratch build takes.
Results
Every item above is verifiable in the Protofire GitHub org. Two representative artifacts: github.com/protofire/subgraph-toolkit (the reusable developer tooling) and github.com/protofire/maker-protocol-subgraph (a protocol subgraph). Both are Protofire-authored, not forks.