🤖 The Evolution of Blockchain Data Repositories for AI Agents

The Graph’s role in the AI ecosystem and its next-generation infrastructure are based on these key pillars:

Agent Economy Data Layer (ERC-8004): Under the ERC-8004 standard, written with contributions from The Graph, MetaMask, Coinbase, and Google, autonomous AI agents’ identities, reputations, and verification histories are indexed cross-chain. An agent’s trustworthiness can be queried in milliseconds. [1, 2]

Blockchain Queries in Natural Language (Subgraph MCP): Thanks to the Subgraph MCP tool, AI assistants such as ChatGPT or Claude can query blockchain data directly using natural language, without the need for complex code. [1]

Machine-to-Machine Payment Standard (x402): A new protocol has been integrated that allows AI agents to pay directly with GRT per query, without needing API keys or preconfigured accounts. [1]

Inference and Agent Services: Announced in The Graph as AI Infrastructure whitepaper, this system enables independent data providers (Indexers) on the network not only to provide data, but also to host AI models and supply computing power. [1, 2]

🛑 Why the Legacy System (Hosted Service) Was Shut Down

The shutdown of the legacy systems you mentioned is known in crypto literature as "The Hosted Service Sunset" and was fully completed as of June 12, 2024. The main areas the team shifted its engineering resources to are as follows: [1]

Full Decentralization (The Sunrise): The legacy system (Hosted Service) was a centralized structure running on The Graph team’s own servers. The team aimed to move all infrastructure to the decentralized The Graph Network, managed entirely by independent node operators (Indexers), and successfully achieved this. [1, 2]

AI and Next-Generation Data Solutions (New Era): Engineering resources have been redirected from maintaining legacy centralized servers to Inference/Agent infrastructure that meets the data needs of AI agents, data streaming services (Substreams), and query tools powered by LLMs (Large Language Models).

$GRT The Graph project positions itself as "the Google of Web3," and with its new infrastructure, it is now progressing towards becoming "a blockchain data repository for AI agents." The main reason for the closure of the old oracle systems we discussed initially is that the team has shifted all its engineering power to this new generation of artificial intelligence infrastructure. $BTC