Subsquid sponsors Gitcoin DeFi & Cross-chain Interoperability Hackathon feat. Chainflip

Not many people know that Subsquid had its inception at Hackusama where it won the infrastructure track. Now that Subsquid is launched as a project the core team is actively supporting the community to continue this legacy and foster the spirit of innovation and collaboration. We are proudly sponsoring the Gitcoin DeFi & Cross-chain Interoperability Hackathon with our friends at Chainflip co-sponsoring the first challenge. All takes place between Oct 18th 2021 and Nov 8th 2021 and we are very excited to see some great implementations of the Subsquid protocol.

DeFi continues to grow massively on the Polkadot/Kusama network, but it remains relatively under the radar. Part of the reason for this is because there aren’t many tools that allow developers to harness the power of the ecosystem. Subsquid is the most advanced framework on the market for turning on-chain data on the Polkadot/Kusama blockchain into an easy-to-use GraphQL API, opening the door for developers to retrieve a wide variety of data from the network quickly and easily.

Subsquid is transforming on-chain data thanks to the processing power of its own Hydra framework, which ensures that the blockchain data is organised ready for scanning every time new data is added to it and not just when searches are performed. The cross-blockchain nature of Subsquid combined with the speed of the Polkadot blockchain means that applications of previously unworkable scope are now possible, ushering in a new era of DApp development.

One great example of Subsquid in applications is Chainflip, utilising Subsquid already as a key piece of infrastructure to aid in the mission of building a generalised cross-chain AMM. Chainflip will allow users to swap assets between arbitrarily differentiated blockchains. Under the hood, Chainflip uses a v3 style AMM run on a Substrate powered blockchain to virtually track the balances of assets held across multiple wallets on multiple blockchains, each needing 100 out of 150 of the Chainflip validator network to produce a valid threshold signature. To achieve this, Chainflip leverages Subsquid to make tracking extrinsics and events on the Chainflip Substrate Chain extremely easy. Extending Subsquid to report events on other major blockchains like Etheruem and Solana will be extremely powerful and enable Chainflip and other development teams to accelerate the pace of DeFi development in the multichain world we live in.

We can’t wait to see what DApp developers are going to do with Subsquid’s next generation protocol, but for those looking for inspiration, here are a few ways in which we think Subsquid can be utilised:

• Oracle integrations, allowing collaboration between Polkadot/Kusama and a raft of other blockchains, including Ethereum
• Aggregating data across multiple chains
• DeFi dashboards for the rapidly growing DeFi projects on Polkadot/Kusama (Acala, Chainflip, HydraDX, etc)
• NFT data from other similar projects (e.g. RMRK)
• Relaying Ethereum and cross-chain events to Kusama and parachains

The DeFi & Cross-chain Interoperability Hackathon will consist of five challenges, and to give you a head start we’ve prepared a little guide to let you know what’s involved for each one:

Challenge 1: Marry Ethereum with Substrate chains (supported by Chainflip)

Add the possibility to fetch EVM events from a contract alongside the Substrate events defined in the manifest. Since there is no canonical order you should come up with an ad-hoc synchronization algorithm to make sure that the events from a Substrate chain and Ethereum are merged in a deterministic and sound way.

Challenge 2: Aggregate data from multiple chains in a single Subsquid API

The goal is to add the possibility to fetch events from multiple data sources defined in the manifest.

Challenge 3: Index Algorand Data

Create a runnable indexer with GraphQL API for Algorand.

Challenge 4: Dashboards and exploration queries for Polkadot data

Make creative use of the data revealed by the indexer databases/API Gateways.

Challenge 5: Build a killer App with Subsquid

Get creative and leverage the power, expressiveness and customization capabilities of Subsquid and the Hydra framework. With Subsquid, you define your data in a schema file and get a ready-to-use powerful API straight away. To populate the database, define your ETL pipeline with mapping scripts and convert the source data into your target entities.

If you’re taking part in the Gitcoin DeFi & Cross-chain Interoperability Hackathon then good luck, and may the best squid win!

Please check Chainflip’s website for more information about the future of cross-chain swapping.

To find out more about Subsquid and what it can do, join us on our Discord server to chat to one of our helpful Subsquid team members or other users.