The Graph Raises $12M in GRT Token Sale; Teases Mainnet Launch in 30-60 Days

The Graph has raised $12 million in a public sale of its native GRT token. The foundation building out the decentralized data protocol announced the close of its sale Wednesday in a blog post.

The token sale reached 4,500 individuals, the foundation said, with the team excluding U.S. investors from participating due to compliance reasons. The Graph joins NEAR, Avalanche and Dapper Labs in a stream of high-value public token sales to close in the early days of 2020’s bull market. Some 400 million GRT tokens were sold in an offering that eschewed CoinList in favor of in-house technology. (Know-your-customer checks, however, were conducted by TokenSoft.)

“What we’re excited about with the sale is getting GRT tokens in the hands of indexers, curators and delegators that are going to be participating in the decentralized network,” The Graph co-founder Yaniv Tal told CoinDesk in a Zoom call.

The Graph seeks to be the decentralized infrastructure of Web3, the crypto shorthand for an internet free of rent-seeking intermediaries. Currently in testnet, the data-indexing protocol helps power popular decentralized finance (DeFi) applications such as Uniswap, Balancer and Synthetix, Tal said. Pulling searchable (and usable) data from hard-to-scrape blockchains makes it a decentralized Google of sorts.

The Graph’s token sale announcement also teased a mainnet launch in the next 30–60 days. “Wide distribution of the GRT token was a primary goal of the sale,” The Graph wrote. “The GRT sale accomplished this goal with significant representation from Russia, Vietnam, China, India and Great Britain, with participation from 99 countries in total.”

The firm previously raised $5 million in a private token sale involving Coinbase Ventures and a $2.5 million seed round led by Multicoin Capital.

“We were fortunate to be the first investor in The Graph,” Multicoin Managing Partner Kyle Samani told CoinDesk via Telegram. “Over the last two and a half years, The Graph has matured to become the gold standard for indexing and querying data out of Ethereum and IFPS. It’s incredible to see The Graph cross 300 million queries process per day as they march toward mainnet.”