In the Project Spotlight series, we interview projects developing on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). Previously, we shared interviews with many projects, including Tenderly, BunnyPark, MOBOX, Covalent, Cybertino, and Ampleforth. Today, it’s StreamingFast under the Spotlight.
Spotlight on StreamingFast
IMPORTANT: Please note the following content does not constitute an endorsement or approval of any of the products or services of the project, organization, or individual.
What is your core business? Can you expand on your business strategy to those unfamiliar with your project?
We are StreamingFast, a team of blockchain core devs that build massively scalable multi-chain infrastructure. We have a passion for blockchain technology, and our goal is to help developers build performant applications by organizing the world’s decentralized data. Recently, we became the second core dev team for The Graph ecosystem, bringing our blazing-fast tech to enable dapp developers to access fast chains such as Binance Smart Chain.
We believe that the future is multi-chain and that each chain will attract use cases that match its characteristics. We want to provide the same powerful data access for each developer, regardless of which chain fits their needs.
When was the idea behind StreamingFast born, and what led to it?
The founding team comprises serial entrepreneurs with deep expertise in big data, cybersecurity, dev ops, and blockchain. Combined, we have built and sold 6 companies, with the last one being sold to Intel. Having worked together on multiple projects previously, we sought a place within the blockchain realm where we could provide the greatest value.
Having built big data solutions at Intel, the team at StreamingFast understands the data engineering challenges of maintaining a big data lake. A blockchain is similar to a big data lake, but very few people are working on how to quickly and reliably read this data. That’s where we come in, with a radically different streaming-first approach. The StreamingFast core value proposition: it’s the most straightforward, fastest, and most reliable blockchain data stream in the industry for real-time as well as historical data.
Can you tell us more about your team’s background and introduce the core members?
While some other teams focused on going deep on just one blockchain ecosystem, we could see that this would never meet the needs of the masses as blockchain continues to strive towards mass adoption. We dig down to the underlying data structure of each blockchain we work on to ensure that we’re building the most performant systems possible. We want to feed The Graph Indexers with data that others struggle to access at speeds they can only dream of. Our internal motto is “Ship it like there’s no tomorrow”, and with the incredible pace of innovation, we know that we need to maintain our expertise across the many ecosystems where developers are calling home.
What are the main advantages of StreamingFast for the user, compared to a similar project from other projects ?
Simply put, other projects have not been able to index data at the speeds that we can. Recently, PancakeSwap held a bounty as they could not obtain the data their info site required at the speed at which Binance Smart Chain was processing transactions. PancakeSwap alone would sometimes have more transactions per day than the entire Ethereum network. Within 2 weeks of being announced, we had indexed and provided them a working endpoint for their v1 subgraph while other solutions were still working on blocks from months prior. A little over a month after that, we had provided them their v2 subgraph data and the ability to reindex the data in only hours to allow for fast iteration and improvements as needed.
Let’s say I want to start using StreamingFast. How should projects start? Where can I find some how-to guides?
Since we are now core devs for The Graph, rather than independent infrastructure providers, the best place to benefit from our tech would be to get acquainted with The Graph. It has become the go-to resource for blockchain developers to power their dapps with reliable, up-to-date data without having to maintain any of your own infrastructures, and in a decentralized way too! We recommend taking a look through the in-depth docs and joining the Discord server.
Why did you decide to build on the Binance Smart Chain?
Hundreds of dApps have attracted millions of users to Binance Smart Chain. If developers have a data struggle, that is where we position ourselves. We had an overwhelming amount of requests for BSC data given the high throughput of the chain, so it was a no-brainer to focus our efforts there and dive down into the code to build a solution that would match the speed of the chain.
What can we expect next from your project? Can you briefly describe your roadmap?
We will bring our expertise to help radically improve indexing performance to The Graph ecosystem. As such, we will open source our proprietary IP for The Graph community to use and will also be focused on core protocol development, indexing services and performance improvements, multi-blockchain expansion, GIP implementation, and developer education. Additionally, we will be contributing to subgraph development, GRPs and GRCs standards, and support for Web3 development tooling.
