The Graph Foundation's Nick Hansen on processing 1.27 trillion queries

0:00All right, we're live at Consensus Miami 2026 with Nick Hansen, team lead at The Graph Foundation, talking about data, AI agents, institutional adoption, and much, much more. Nick, I appreciate you taking the time. Well, first of all, thank you so much for doing this. Appreciate the work you're doing. It's It's really nice to meet you, and good vibe here this year. Definitely, yeah.

0:21Super fun, and there's a lot going on. You know, I've seen The Graph around for a few years now, and you guys are ahead of the curve on data and now AI agents and AI integrating with blockchain. Data's so important with blockchain, especially as institutions come in. I'm sure we can touch on that later, but data is probably everything. It is, and any industry runs

0:43on data, right? So, The Graph story's been very easy to tell, and as you noted, I mean, The Graph's a pioneer in this industry. So, long before big shows like this and a lot of the attention that people have in this space, The Graph was first to the market on querying blockchain data. And so, there's a lot of pride in the brand and what The Graph represented, introduced a

1:02lot of standards to the industry in relationship to querying blockchain data, and how that lifeblood to any industry is going to be handled in the blockchain space. And we're thrilled to be here at Consensus this year. We support a lot of the chains and a lot of the people here, and so, The Graph is one of those things where it's like silent but deadly infrastructure.

1:20Everybody's using it, nobody knows who's using what, and we're really very proud of that. Definitely. And as more institutions come into the industry, maybe you can give a high-level on Obviously, data's important, and a good example could be, you know, for trading or getting a competitive advantage in the markets, but I'm sure that there's many, many reasons and types of data.

1:40Can you sort of give a high-level on The Graph and those different types of data that you can provide? Yeah, so I think that's an important question, right? Because you can segment the market in so many different ways. Institutions have an interest in data that's far different from a developer that's building a dapp in their you know, in their garage or coming up

1:57with the big idea. So, the way I would think about it is blockchains were fundamentally designed to be written to. That was it, right? A public ledger that can't be manipulated. Somebody at some point needed to come along and make that blockchain data easier to read and access. And so, as I said, The Graph was a first mover in that. So, once you got

2:17that piping to read that data, what you want to do with it is really at the hands of the builder. And The Graph has always been very builder-focused. And so, we look at what the protocol exists and the current road map, and we're trying to design products and solutions that can accommodate all different types of use cases. So, institutions, what kind of data do they

2:38need? Well, they're interested in transactional data, but they have regulatory mandates such that the quality of that data, the way it's maintained, and custodianship of that data, auditability is really important. A developer, however, and in fact, we're at the booth here, I just spoke with a developer that's building a pretty cool NFT idea, they don't need all of that

2:56sort of regulatory implications that institutions need on the data. They need something more simple and streamlined. So, when your infrastructure and you want to accommodate an entire growing and evolving industry, The Graph sets up the piping, different data solutions to accommodate end-to-end all types of that. Now, you've mentioned a couple

3:17times AI, and AI is its own sort of bag of tricks. Definitely. I'd love to dive into that. First, I have a question about quality versus quantity of data. You know, you can have you can have a lot of data, but if it's not high quality, then it's not much good. Yeah, so this question of you can get the data, but is it verifiable, and these things is a huge

3:38challenge for any participant in the industry. And The Graph's been working on that for a long time. As I'm sure you know, and I hope listeners know, The Graph's a decentralized protocol, so it's not a centralized SaaS. We have core developer teams within the ecosystem over a number of years that have been contributing to things such as verifiability and making sure the data

3:55is of high quality. But the problem in my mind is a little bit less about the verifiability and the quality of the data. At this stage in the evolution of the industry, it's about how do we treat all these different blockchains in a way that a data provider can synthesize and make that data composable. Cuz a real block in my mind to this web 3 vision and what crypto

4:19sort of always intended to be is the composability of all these different blockchains. And The Graph has been working on that. The couple of one of the founders spun off and is devoting in their entire time to coming up with that composability and making web 3 data more composable. So yeah, quality certainly important. I would argue getting all these different blockchains into one

4:41solution and the composability between chains is at this stage a more important problem. Definitely. I agree. And maybe we can touch on the decentralized nature of it and the importance of that. I feel like as institutions come in, they want quality data and they want to do what they did in TradFi. They might not necessarily see as much value in decentralized or not decentralized

5:06part of an ecosystem as they did from traditional finance. Yeah, so to be fully honest with you, that's a really important question because we're seeing institutions come to the market. Institutions are interested in the tech and the solutions being built in the space. But what is the appetite of a publicly traded Wall Street based institution to use a decentralized protocol? And when

5:30you start thinking about it and framing it that way, things like SOC 2 compliance, which in the US means you're regulated and you've met the high bar under regulate the regulatory bodies to participate in that space, as well as KYC and a lot of these other things that early web 3, early crypto industry would have said, "No, we're actually revolting against this stuff." But now that the

5:51institutions are showing up, projects like The Graph and pretty much every booth here needs to figure out how to accommodate that. So, the way we're thinking about that is number one, The Graph is not going to abandon decentralization. It's a core thesis of what this thing is from DNA birth to present. So, the question is, okay, if institutions have some friction to using

6:12a decentralized permissionless protocol, what are the ways in which we can bend and flex this decentralized solution in such a way to take advantage of that market opportunity? And there's a lot of different ways to do it. You and your audience may or may not know this, but you know, The Graph has been working alongside DTCC, huge player in the trad fi space, and we

6:35have learned a lot through, you know, our connections there and working alongside a monolith like that to understand what the appetite and what the needs are of institutional users. And so, I would say institutions are here. It's unknown quite yet what their appetite is for using decentralized protocols per se, but there's enough bend and flex here that projects like

7:00The Graph that are forward-thinking and willing to take advantage of those opportunities will be fine. And I think there's a lot of value creation to be had there. Definitely. There's a lot of narratives that have been shaping are really starting to seem like they're starting to build a foundation of the industry and also the merging of AI with blockchain, AI agents, and

7:21stablecoins, payments and privacy also a little bit there. I don't know if we could touch on that, but how does the Graph's road map sort of integrate some of these things that are shaping up to be sort of the pillars of the next part of web 3? Yeah. So, The Graph's most recent road map really postulates a future where The Graph needs to act more like a marketplace.

7:48Meaning, if you've got a community of node operators that have tried and tested this technology at the protocol level, and you have a marketplace of data service providers, why wouldn't they just plug into something like The Graph and run it there? So, the pro the road map really postulates that all these booths that are in the data game, who want to put their data service, host

8:14their data service on a decentralized network, would see the value in doing it with The Graph the industry pioneering technology and the proven and tried and tested proven technology that The Graph has. So, I think in that regard, you know, AI comes along and it opens up this whole new frontier. You were talking earlier about what is the appetite of the market for data

8:37quality, verifiability, volume. AI's its own animal. And you've been around long enough to know every week it's something new in AI. That curve of like what's going on in that space is ever changing and highly evolving. And so, in the road map, The Graph not only postulates that we need to become more of a marketplace for data service providers, but we also need to become

9:01more hyper aware of what's happening in DeFi and AI. And DeFi really encapsulates, in my mind, this running parallel to institutions and enterprise. Hard to know how those two places will play together, but those are really the core of what the road map postulates. Definitely. In terms of decentralized finance, you know, DeFi really is the core, but as these institutions come in,

9:24we're also seeing tokenization of real world assets, money markets, eventually into, you know, tokenized stocks and then real estate and everything tokenized in the world.

Yeah. What about the data behind that and sort of expanding beyond DeFi? So, my answer to that is all of that's super exciting. A lot of those threads have been around for a

9:45while. RWAs have been around for a while. So, I'm still waiting for that shoe to drop. Not being cynical, just saying like, "Okay, what's really going to happen there?" Stablecoins are interesting. I think when the enterprise and institutional users show up, all that's going to shift. That narrative's going to change even more. We heard today about DTCC and the announcement

10:05about stablecoins and trading in July. That was a big announcement. So, that's a first-mover type of activity where we won't know a lot of this other stuff until July when we start seeing monoliths like DTCC behave in the space. All of that said, The Graph's position is any one of those market participants that need to be able to read blockchain data, either because they need the

10:27information in-house or they must provide it to a user, they're going to need a solution for that. And there's nobody better positioned than The Graph to be the key provider. Definitely. That's super exciting. In terms of in the near future, second half of 2026, what do you think is the most valuable type of data in blockchain data solutions that these institutions

10:49want? Well, based on conversations, you know, I've been privy to have, and I'm I'm lucky about that. Institutions are smart. They have shareholders that want a return on their money. They have public earnings calls, and they file reports to the government. So, far different than some other industry participants in the space. They're very dialed up, and they're very

11:11serious. They're looking at top-performing chains, where all the action is or where the trade's going to exist, right? So, when you sit down with an institutional or enterprise type client or user, they're not talking about all blockchains. They're talking about a list of blockchains where all the action is, and they want to make sure they're best positioned

11:34and available to participate in that space. I don't want to say the names. I don't think that's a good move for me and my role at The Graph Foundation, but I will say it always comes down to a handful of five or six chains, and they want to know what's your what's your depth on those chains, what's your redundancy, how much how much exposure and support do you

11:54have for those chains, and those are the questions that those users are asking about. Definitely. And in terms of retail as well, do they can they get access to some of this data, you know, in a smaller capacity if they have a small budget to try to take advantage and sort of meet where those big players are at?

Yeah. So, the price of using the Graph

12:17is Graph is same for everybody, and the Graph really launched with that small hobbyist, solo developer in mind. And so, we have still within the user ecosystem of the Graph, a lot of those solo entrepreneurs that are launching a dapp that's reporting or creating a dashboard on some TradFi activity, I'm sorry, DeFi activity or NFTs, and it's cheap to use, it's easy to use. It

12:46just comes down to how important is data to the solution you're providing, and in terms of the competitive field, how important is to you to build on a decentralized protocol and benefit from all the redundancy and decentralization that comes with it. Yeah, I love that you guys are keeping that decentralized ethos and also being able to support small developers, solo entrepreneurs,

13:09especially with AI. It's like we're getting so many one-man teams here. 100%. Yeah, I mean AI's changed everything. Yeah. I thought I was riding an amazing curve personally moving from TradFi into crypto. I'm like, "Oh, this is crazy. This blockchain space is really something." Then AI came along. At first it was funky to me. I don't know what your first experiences were, but LLMs were

13:31funny. You could put funny questions in there or contrived situations and there was like water cooler jokes going back and forth with AI. But man, that curve has been unbelievable. I can't keep up with it. I'm non-technical. So I really don't have a chance, but watching what people are building and the flexibility and the agility in the marketplace. I

13:50think Jack Dorsey said it best the other day. I don't know if you saw this quote, but he said, you know, there used to be a point in time in corporate life where if someone had an idea for a product and they wanted to come pitch the executive team, it was usually a slideshow or a Google Doc. People are bringing prototypes now. They just come in with a

14:07prototype. That's insane and that's the new reality. And I think Coinbase's announcement today reducing staff by 14%. Hard to read, super disappointed in colleagues and friends that I know at Coinbase that are affected by that, but the real announcement in that thing is how they're going more AI-based and I'm sure it relates back to what Dorsey and a lot of other people have noticed.

14:29Definitely. Yeah, it's even myself also being non-technical, I'm getting FOMO and I'm becoming a developer and you know, I just dive into it even more. One thing about AI that we didn't touch on yet is AI agents and I feel like a lot of people are going to access the data like through an agent interface or something like that. Do you see that tying into the graph and

14:54that you're you're not using it directly, but perhaps an AI agent as intermediary? So there are teams within the graph ecosystem, Edge & Node specifically, who are seriously contemplating this agentic economy and how sort of the graph and the type of solutions that need to exist in that are. I'm uncertain of what that future looks like. I think for example, it's

15:18easy to envision based on the of AI and people like you and I becoming developers overnight, there is this low entry point where it's not hard to imagine a future where we are spinning up agents and there is this agentic economy. Are we on the cusp of that? I don't really know. I'm having a hard time making sense and part of my cynicism with respect to everybody here

15:41is [snorts] for so many years this industry's always chased meta narratives, right? Something comes along and it's like, "Oh, let's let's tether to that. Let's tie to that." It was the EFTs for a while, it's AI now, NFTs for a period of time, DeFi summer. So, I'm not sure about what the sustainability of that particular narrative is or sort of what that looks

16:03like over the long term. I'm excited by an agentic future. The graph is [clears throat] well positioned to serve that type of use case. Is that going to be the unlock or the killer app for this industry? You know, Mark Andreessen recently postulated that the agentic economy is the killer app for crypto. He's a lot smarter than I am, so I'd probably listen to him but more than me.

16:25But, the key at The Graph and within this ecosystem is being positioned for all these opportunities. Yeah. And in the event that it is an agentic future, being well positioned to participate in that. Personally, I'm super excited about the idea that there's an agent out there that I could send some money to or set up a wallet to and it could

16:45become my financial advisor, it could become my tax consultant, it could do all these things for me. Super excited about that. Don't know if we're quite there yet, but would love to see it.

It seems like that's the trajectory. We're getting there. So, yeah, only time will tell, but some of these innovators have Yeah, they're saying there's going to be more

17:05Transactions in wallets, AI agents than people, and crypto was was made for AI agents, so

100%. I mean, that's a really important point that I think people often gloss over, which is if you just put on your history hat for minute here and try to look at at a high level all these different things that are emerging like where did this blockchain thing come through?

17:24Where did this AI thing come from? It's no coincidence to me that in parallel you have this agent type technology at a time when you've got blockchain. Yeah. And I think the marriage marriage there when we're you know 100 years down the line 500 year the historians will look back and be like oh wow that was really serendipitous that those two things sort

17:46of grew and emerged at the same time because as you said it seems to me they're designed for each other. Definitely. Well I appreciate all your insights into this and graphs the graphs position on it. Once again you know I love that you guys are sticking to the decentralized side of it but also tying into to AI following where that leads. No one

18:05really knows what's happening. What's the best way for institutions or individuals retail investors or developers to check out the graph and the quality data? Yeah it's a little tricky but definitely just go to graph.com. That's a really powerful website that can point any user in the right direction. Follow us on Twitter at the graph protocol. We're constantly

18:25making announcements from the foundation. I should say you know the graph is a decentralized protocol. We've got a strong foundation team that's stewarding the health and growth of the ecosystem but we have a lot of builders and a lot of developers participating in this ecosystem doing a lot of the hard work. Huge shout out to our indexer community all those independent node

18:41operators that are really the backbone of supplying all that blockchain data. It's all the developers and builders that have been building on the graph for a lot of years but go to the website follow us on Twitter stay up-to-date on what's happening at the bleeding edge of data. Amazing. Thank you so much Nick.

Yeah. Good luck with everything you're

18:56working on.

you.