GameChanger: New Cardano GraphQL + API as a Service Protocol

[Proposal setup] Proposal title

Please provide your proposal title

GameChanger: New Cardano GraphQL + API as a Service Protocol

[Proposal Summary] Budget Information

Enter the amount of funding you are requesting in ADA

200000

[Proposal Summary] Time

Please specify how many months you expect your project to last

7

[Proposal Summary] Translation Information

Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated

No

Original Language

en

[Proposal Summary] Problem Statement

What is the problem you want to solve?

Cardano GraphQL allows for custom queries and less API calls. With network growth it's performance and maintainance became a problem. We want to offer a modern redesign as devs and students needs it.

[Proposal Summary] Supporting Documentation

Supporting links

• https://github.com/zxpectre/hasura-based-schema-example

[Proposal Summary] Project Dependencies

Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

Yes

Describe any dependencies or write 'No dependencies'

Depends on official Cardano GraphQL API and would benefit from a joint maintainance effort for the times to come, considering that the new design would simplify this considerably. Depends on GraphQL libraries, tools and their maintenance. Depends on Dandelion Lite project for easier deployment (optional).

[Proposal Summary] Project Open Source

Will your project's outputs be fully open source?

Yes

Please provide details on the intellectual property (IP) status of your project outputs, including whether they will be released as open source or retained under another licence.

Our work will be licensed under MIT License, open source licenses from dependencies may apply separatedly

[Theme Selection] Theme

Please choose the most relevant theme and tag related to the outcomes of your proposal

Infrastructure

[Campaign Category] Category Questions

Describe what makes your idea innovative compared to what has been previously launched in the market (whether by you or others).

Official Cardano GraphQL API is the first and legacy implementation of a general-purpose Cardano API using GraphQL specification. Across 5+ years of existance this project shined but then as ledger growed in time it started to face architectural challenges, underperformed, started consuming way more resources than initially needed and it's source code repository even stalled and switched maintainer teams more than once. We are deeply gratefull for these teams and founding entities efforts to create it and keep it alive but GameChanger Wallet and ecosystem dapps around us leveraged on it since the begining, we know the pain points of using and deploying it and we are conviced we can offer the community a fresh new look at this good old API without forcing everybody to face mandatory breaking changes. To implement all the planned improvements demands a huge rewrite at the former project and will be most likely impractical and over-complicated.

We want to provide a fresh new start, a a lightweight alternative implementation, built by consumers, for consumers. With performance and mantainance in mind, with a smaller and simpler system requirement list, and with modern, much needed and novel features.

Describe what your prototype or MVP will demonstrate, and where it can be accessed.

Code will be available using it's repository but API service will be deployed at some/all Dandelion Network nodes or at least at an official deployment.

It will demonstrate the new implementation can perform well, consume less resources and became easier to deploy.

It will also demonstrate how this API can be monetized, collaborating on more on-chain transactions for payments to consume the service.

Describe realistic measures of success, ideally with on-chain metrics.

We will deploy an MVP on mainnet, only monetization solution could be removed on the Pre-production Testnet deployment (to be defined).

• on-chain transactions as payments for the services
• amount of apps/services/users consuming the API

[Your Project and Solution] Solution

Please describe your proposed solution and how it addresses the problem

Every mature blockchain ecosystem counts with an active flagship GraphQL API to ease development and allow for faster development iteration and prototyping, to minimize centralization by avoid forcing developers to build their own custom backend solutions and to empower more client side development by keeping backends open sourced and general-purposed.

The GraphQL API specification allows for nesting API schemas and even cross relate them to allow developers to design their desired data queries by filtering and nesting responses, all on a single client-server communication (HTTP request).

Cardano-GraphQL was the most powerfull API back in the day making possible many of the legacy projects and exchange integrations around us.

In principle this new redesign will be based on the legacy open source project created by IOHK and maintained by Cardano Foundation, specially regarding database schema to leverage on the 5+ year old project with their mature experience, and also to be able to absorve their updates and mutually collaborate on improvements.

Our approach for this will be to offer almost the same API endpoints but with a totally different, modern and optimized GraphQL introspection engine underneath, reducing system requirements, boosting deployment count to distribute/decentralize the service more.

This will allow us to offer the same solution but in a single instance with chances of reusing some recurrent tasks and database tables from other open source API projects also operating over a Cardano DBSync database. Our goal will be to make it easy to maintain to maximize open source collaboration.

Engine optimizations will allow to solve problems like the N+1 fetch issues, a common GraphQL performance failure where the same database information is fetched more than once on same query. Other improvements will be around schema design, optimizing when possible queries involving off-chain token registry, on-chain assets and address balances.

Is important to keep in mind that we cannot promise this to be a drop-in replacement of the former API implementation, but if this is something technically possible to be achieved we will try to do so, otherwise we will try to narrow down differences at a reasonable level.

This service will be designed to be deployed on Dandelion Lite in first place, a Cardano Node and APIs self sovereign deployment solution for decentralizing Cardano services and for empowering students and developers. ARP Radio, Moments and GameChanger Wallet already use it. This new implementation will improve and add much needed features to all these dapps and wallet, and many more out there.

Also a prototype/MVP of a monetizing solution to provide it as a service will be added to incentivize operator adoption and to encourage user feedback in order to grow beyond last project milestone.

A research and custom schema analysis tool has been developed to identify underlying introspection engine patterns of the former API, in order to gain enough knowledge to replicate/re-implement the same API with a totally different internal architecture.

Check out other Catalyst proposals here:

https://github.com/GameChangerFinance/gamechanger.wallet/blob/main/catalyst/FUND15.md

[Your Project and Solution] Impact

Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community

A modern redesign of a powerfull API: the renewed Cardano GraphQL will help to keep the project up to date, will simplify maintenance, and will improve it's performance, helping early projects and exchanges to keep their software up to date and giving fresh air to an API that helped bootstrap the ecosystem once, totally capable of boosting it's growth on modern days.

Easier to learn and integrate: A single battle tested, well known, common query language for all things Cardano versus narrow-scoped, individual, novel, eclectic API solutions that are a nightmare to combine and reuse and in isolation fail to provide the entirety of data you need.

Smarter queries: Ask exactly the data you need, remove what you dont need, and pack all communications into single client-server interactions vs hammering servers with similar queries and mix totally different API services only to get what you need

Faster queries: By avoiding several roundtrips from client side to servers and calling them all server-side is that some queries can end up being faster, besides bringing the exact amount of data required leaving unwanted data behind.

Cheaper solutions: Spend less resources as you launch less client-server communications to obtain the same information

Better development cycles: Iterate faster and spend less development resources as updating backends on each step of the way becomes a thing of the past. Update your client side only as what your backend already provides is more than enough already.

Online IDE + Self-Documented: GraphQL schemas can be explored, queries can be designed on code editors that are provided out of the box.

Less backend-side centralization: universal, general purpose, fully-featured open source APIs does not incentivize for custom centralized backend solutions on every project we build on Cardano

Decentralization-friendly backends: general purpose, flexible common backend solutions for every client side project to consume vs siloed, specialized, closed source solutions nobody is interested in re-deploy for better redundancy and dec.ntralization.

Incentivize service operators with on-chain payments to also boost Cardano usage.

[Your Project and Solution] Capabilities & Feasibility

What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

We are a team of Cardano builders that have been building since 2021. We have built the GameChanger Wallet (https://gamechanger.finance/) a unique innovative wallet. We also built Dandelion-lite (https://github.com/GameChangerFinance/dandelion-lite) to make truly decentralized financial infrastructure a reality. We have gained a lot of experience in all aspects of Cardano developement. A number of dApps and teams are building on our foundations and we are launching this project driven by the need to improve and grow for as all.

A research and analysis tool was built for this project already and has given us the confidence of what's technically possible to achieve and we are ready for taking next steps.

[Milestones] Project Milestones

Milestone Title

Project base + Cardano GraphQL (core)

Milestone Outputs

• A public repository with a branch or tag referencing Milestone 1, under MIT license
• A typescript project addressing this proposal
• A subdirectory of the project containing the core components of the new Cardano-GraphQL implementation in typescript in a reasonable working state
• Auxiliar schema and metadata files, produced, adapted or extracted from project dependencies like Cardano-GraphQL or Cardano-DBSync. Produced schema and auxiliary data files are expected to be large files and will take care of our first approach of narrowing down differences with the former implementation, and or may not contain:
  • SQL migration operations
  • collection names,
  • attribute names,
  • relations information,
  • permissions
  • and other parameters

Acceptance Criteria

• I can verify public access to the repository and the listed and accesible branch, with the MIT license file on it
• I can clone the repository and install it locally to start developing with it
• I can run this early stage of the project and execute queries with it on the online code editor on my browser
• I can see the auxiliar schema and metadata files on my local clone of the repository or on github
• Important: This kind of backend project relies on several dependencies running in background such as Cardano-Node, Cardano-DBSync, PostgresDB, etc... We strongly suggest you use Dandelion-Lite (https://github.com/GameChangerFinance/dandelion-lite ) and dedicated hardware to do so but how to set up these services properly and how to troubleshoot them goes far beyond the scope of the acceptance criteria. We will try to assist as possible. This notice applies to most of the milestones of this project.

Evidence of Completion

• The existance and public access of the repository with the branch or tag referencing Milestone 1. The MIT license file is present.
• The existance and installable state of the base project
• The existance and basic executable state of the new Cardano-GraphQL implementation
• The existance of auxiliar schema and metadata files

Delivery Month

2

Cost

50000

Progress

30 %

Milestone Title

Cardano Graph Q L (refinements) + Testing + Docs

Milestone Outputs

• Milestone 2 branch or tag containing this milestone's outputs
• Cardano GraphQL refinements narrowing differences between this and the former implementation, and improving aspects of it such as
  • Type casting/conversions (optional)
  • Filters (optional)
  • Aggregations (optional)
  • Missing/Added/Improved collections (optional)
  • Missing/Added/Improved relations (optional)
  • Reduced amount of extra constructs on schema (optional)
  • Improved database schema (optional)
  • Improved database recurrent cron tasks (optional)
  • Improved code design (optional)
  • Performance (optional)
  • More... (optional)
• Typedoc: reasonable amount of code being documented

Acceptance Criteria

• I can verify existance and public access of Milestone 2 branch or tag
• I can execute queries with this new version and verify that these refinements are applied to the code regarding the listed topics
• I can navigate through the code and verify the existance of a reasonable amount of Typedoc comments accross the code

Evidence of Completion

• The existance and public access of the repository with the branch or tag referencing Milestone 2
• Code base has been expanded with more features, schema and auxiliar files has been improved
• The existance of reasonable amount of documented code is present

Delivery Month

4

Cost

50000

Progress

60 %

Milestone Title

API as a Service Protocol

Milestone Outputs

• Milestone 3 branch or tag containing this milestone's outputs
• Implementation of a monetization feature/interface/system using an on-chain payment based protocol. Final details are to be defined but current idea is a subscription model with consumable credits per http request.
• Other Cardano GraphQL improvements (if any)

Acceptance Criteria

• I can verify existance and public access of Milestone 3 branch or tag
• I can setup and run the server and test the monetization features implemented, using on-chain payments to use the API
• I can verify existance of further code improvements (if any)

Evidence of Completion

• The existance and public access of the repository with the branch or tag referencing Milestone 3
• The existance of a monetization feature on the repository, internally implemented in Typescript or with other technologies within the project
• The existance of some other code improvements (if any)

Delivery Month

5

Cost

40000

Progress

80 %

Milestone Title

Testing + Deployment Setup + Docs

Milestone Outputs

• Milestone 4 branch or tag containing this milestone's outputs
• Prepare for production deployment, Dockerfile, use/expose environment variables.
• Other Cardano GraphQL improvements (if any)
• Testing suite with a basic code coverage considering the size of the API
• General documentation: How to install, run and execute some queries

Acceptance Criteria

• I can verify existance and public access of Milestone 4 branch or tag
• I can find changes an code to allow for deployment builds, and automated workflows to generate a docker image.
• I can execute queries with this new version and verify that some refinements are applied (if any)
• I can run the testing suite and verify that all tests are passing, or I can check the existance of the tests source code and I can see the verifiable test results published online
• I can read the general documentation containing information about how to install, run and execute some common queries

Evidence of Completion

• The existance and public access of the repository with the branch or tag referencing Milestone 4
• API can now be deployed using a succesfully-built docker image
• Code base has been expanded with improvements (if any)
• Now a testing suite has been included for testing this first API
• General documentation has been added or expanded to cover the basics

Delivery Month

6

Cost

30000

Progress

90 %

Milestone Title

Final Docs + Closeout documentation and video

Milestone Outputs

• Milestone 5 branch or tag containing this milestone's outputs
• Added missing documentation if any, probably addressing deployment and monetization protocol
• Closeout documentation and video demonstrating the project outcome

Acceptance Criteria

• I can verify existance and public access of Milestone 4 branch or tag
• I can read a reasonable amount of documentation
• I can read the final report and watch the video demonstration and verify the working state of the project and the achieved goals

Evidence of Completion

• The existance and public access of the repository with the branch or tag referencing Milestone 4
• The existance of more documentation content or new files
• The existances and public access to the final report and video

Delivery Month

7

Cost

30000

Progress

100 %

[Final Pitch] Budget & Costs

Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

Milestone 1: 50000 ADA

Milestone 2: 50000 ADA

Milestone 3: 40000 ADA

Milestone 4: 30000 ADA

Milestone 5: 30000 ADA

~960hs x USD 85/hr = USD 81.600,00 = 272000,00 ADA at an expected rate taken from 2025 price volatility

Total: 200000 ADA

[Final Pitch] Value for Money

How does the cost of the project represent value for the Cardano ecosystem?

Competing blockchains have active and popular GraphQL API's. Even Midnight. Students,builders, dapps, wallets, many of us need this API, and we need it to be performant, modern, easier to maintain, more sustainable and to iterate faster. What we want to build is for the wide benefit of Cardano Ecosystem. As always cost of project is more than reasonable considering what's being offered and current and expected market prices.

[Self-Assessment] Self-Assessment Checklist

I confirm that evidence of prior research, whitepaper, design, or proof-of-concept is provided.

Yes

I confirm that the proposal includes ecosystem research and uses the findings to either (a) justify its uniqueness over existing solutions or (b) demonstrate the value of its novel approach.

Yes

I confirm that the proposal demonstrates technical capability via verifiable in-house talent or a confirmed development partner (GitHub, LinkedIn, portfolio, etc.)

Yes

I confirm that the proposer and all team members are in good standing with prior Catalyst projects.

Yes

I confirm that the proposal clearly defines the problem and the value of the on-chain utility.

Yes

I confirm that the primary goal of the proposal is a working prototype deployed on at least a Cardano testnet.

Yes

I confirm that the proposal outlines a credible and clear technical plan and architecture.

Yes

I confirm that the budget and timeline (≤ 12 months) are realistic for the proposed work.

Yes

I confirm that the proposal includes a community engagement and feedback plan to amplify prototype adoption with the Cardano ecosystem.

Yes

I confirm that the budget is for future development only; excludes retroactive funding, incentives, giveaways, re-granting, or sub-treasuries.

Yes

[Required Acknowledgements] Consent & Confirmation

I Agree

Yes