The Graph · 2026-11-02 21:12 UTC

Rewards Eligibility Oracle: A Two-Month Retrospective On August 25th, indexing rewards on The Graph started going only to Indexers that serve queries. That change is the Rewards Eligibility Oracle (REO). Nine weeks later, the bar has gone up twice, and the on-chain data shows what each step did. Why REO exists For most of The Graph Network's history, indexing rewards followed curation signal and allocated stake. Neither one checks whether an Indexer served a query. In 2025, 15.2% of indexing rewards went to Indexers that were not serving queries or indexing data that consumers used. REO checks once a day. An Indexer is eligible if it has at least 5 online days in a rolling 28-day window. An online day needs qualifying queries on a minimum number of Subgraphs. A qualifying query returns HTTP 200, responds in under 5,000 ms, and comes from an Indexer within 50,000 blocks of chainhead. Total issuance does not change. REO just changes who receives it. Improving quality in three steps August 25: Enforcement on at 1 Subgraph per online day October 6: Requires Indexers to serve 5 Subgraphs October 27: Requires Indexers to serve 10 Subgraphs Step 1: Indexers stepped up At enforcement, 70 Indexers were active and 51 passed. By October 5th, 55 were eligible, and none had lost eligibility. Four Indexers qualified for the first time. Three of them went from serving on 0% of days to 79%. Step 2: The 5-Subgraph rule did what it was designed to do From October 6th to October 26th, eligible Indexers fell from 55 to 48. Nine failed the first daily check under the new rule. The ones that lost eligibility did not serve at least 5 Subgraphs on enough days. Rewards paid per day held steady, at 636K GRT against 622K in Step 1. Fewer Indexers shared them. That total was at 47, down from 52. Step 3: Still settling On October 29th, 47 Indexers were eligible, but modeling projects 42 by the end of the cycle. Renewals last 14 days, so the full effect shows by about November 10th. Where the GRT went About 667,000 GRT built up on the allocations of Indexers that failed REO. It went to a reclaim contract instead of to those Indexers. Before this upgrade, rewards that could not be paid were never minted. Reclaimed GRT may be reintroduced to the ecosystem through protocol governance. No decision has been made on how it will be used. Delegators Almost all GRT undelegated from failing Indexers came from Indexers that never qualified. Even so, 79.0M GRT was still delegated to Indexers failing REO on October 29th. Every Indexer's status is public on the REO dashboard: reo.thegraph.com What comes next The Foundation will measure how the network responds to the 10-Subgraph rule before the next change. Any change goes into the public criteria document with a justification and takes effect 14 days later. REO is the first of three changes to network economics in the Foundation's mandate. GRT Liquid Staking and Direct Indexer Payments follow. Full retrospective, with every table and chart: thegraph.com/blog/reo-two-month-retrospective

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