📝 Editor's Note:

At OurNetwork, data protocols is a broad term we use to categorize projects in crypto which deal with onchain data in some way. Use cases range from fetching blockchain data, to accessibly serving it up, to storing it.

For part 1 of this 2 part series OurNetwork is featuring four contributors — Christina is covering The Graph, Will is covering Arweave, Maus has taken on Covalent, and Sean is looking into Gas Network. 

– ON Editorial Team

The Graph | Arweave | Covalent | Gas Network

• Looking at subgraph data, Q1 2025 shows strong momentum with 12,402 active subgraphs, representing a 9.8% quarter-over-quarter increase from the 11,294 in Q4 2024. The ecosystem has exploded by a factor of over 11 since Q2 2023, with the most dramatic acceleration occurring in Q2 2024 (246% growth to 7,370). Growth has now stabilized at healthy double-digit rates, with Q1 2025 adding 1,108 net new subgraphs, indicating strong developer adoption and platform maturity.

• Developer activity surges in Q2. April 2025 hit a peak with 199,068 total NPM downloads (121,605 CLI + 77,463 TS). Q2 2025 shows exceptional momentum as April and May alone generated 438,106 downloads, marking the strongest two month period on record. Graph CLI adoption has accelerated by 65% since February.

• Q1 2025 data consumers reached 5,276, marking a 7% growth from Q4 2024. The number of data consumers has expanded 8.6x since Q2 2023's. Consumer adoption shows steady momentum with 345 net new users added in Q1 2025.

• Arweave is a data storage protocol designed to create a permanent, decentralized web of information. For data storage, nearly all transaction fees flow into an endowment pool, creating a sustainable long-term storage system where one-time payments from users can fund perpetual storage. In May, Arweave’s storage endowment grew by an all-time-high of of roughly 28,000 AR tokens, creating deflationary pressure on the digital asset's supply. This represents a 52% increase month-over-month in endowment growth, with the total endowment surpassing 226,000 AR.

• Although endowment growth hit a new all-time-high, monthly transactions and data uploads showed moderate softening in Q2 2025 compared to Q1 2025 levels.

• Record endowment growth was driven by rising AR-denominated storage costs, which peaked at 2.42 AR per Gibibyte in May 2025. Average Q2 2025 (to-date) storage costs of 2.17 AR per Gibibyte mark an 86% quarter-over-quarter jump from Q1 2025's 1.17 AR per Gibibyte average.

• Covalent’s API has reached a new all-time high in premium credit consumption in mid May — tripling its previous peak and marking a 5x increase in usage since Monday. The API is now averaging over 2M calls per day, with 95% of those being paid. This surge is reflected in credit usage too: 300M to 400M premium credits are consumed daily, compared to just 7M to 15M in free credits.

• The share of paid calls on Covalent’s API has reached its highest level to date — 95% of all calls are now paid. With daily volume above 2M to 3M requests, the majority of usage is directly monetized. This reflects not just growing demand, but effective conversion of that demand into revenue.

• The biggest share of the paid API's revenue is used to market buy CXT, Covalent's native token. Since the beginning of 2024, over 5.2M CXT have been bought back through API-generated revenue, accounting for over $400k, 1.4%, of the current market capitalization of the token.

• Fees are the lifeblood of web3. They reflect actual demand for blockspace, and are the largest areas of spend across the entire onchain ecosystem, with more than $5.3B being spent in 2024 across all the major L1 and L2s. Gas Network is a decentralized oracle network that brings gas prices onchain—securely, transparently, and efficiently.

• For most of 2025, Solana has dominated fee markets, consistently outpacing Ethereum in transaction fee share. But in June, Ethereum has overtaken Solana's lead with 25.8% of total gas spend. Time will reveal whether this is a temporary blip or the beginning of a shift in momentum.

• Gas is the throughline of the Ethereum roadmap. Across all mainnet upgrades, roughly 45% of the Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) have been directly or indirectly related to gas and fees. This figure might be striking at first, but it shows that gas considerations have been at the heart of Ethereum’s evolution.