Yesterday evening, I had the opportunity to attend a financial services dinner with leaders from financial services firms, law firms, prediction markets, among others. One thing in particular stood out to me.
When the conversation turned to onchain data, there was genuine surprise at how much work still goes into getting it into a product. The assumption was that you just pick a provider and plug it in. The reality is that the data layer is still maturing, there are real solutions out there, but it's not yet as simple as most people outside the space expect.
That tracks with what I hear from the teams who are building. Billions of dollars have gone into DeFi, L2 scaling, wallets, but the data layer, the part every app, dashboard, analytics platform, and AI agent needs to actually work, hasn't matured at the same pace. Currently, getting that data into your product is harder than it should be, and teams are spending a good portion of their engineering time on data infrastructure instead of building.
The Problem
Here's what the problem looks like in practice. A team starts building on a blockchain, they write contracts, design a frontend, connect a wallet; then they need data, token balances, transaction histories, contract events, NFT metadata, account activity.
It should be fairly simple, but public endpoints have rate limits and no uptime guarantees, which is fine for experimenting, but not for production. Self-hosted indexers need dedicated DevOps, terabytes of storage, and constant maintenance. So, teams typically end up building their own data pipelines, they write custom indexers, they duct-tape together multiple providers, and they spend months maintaining infrastructure.
The Timing Is Right
Three things are happening at once.
Apps are increasingly multi-chain. A wallet provider serves users across multiple networks, building separate data pipelines per chain is expensive and fragile. Teams need one interface that normalizes data across ecosystems.
AI agents need data APIs. Everyone's talking about autonomous agents operating onchain, but an agent that can't query real-time onchain state is just a chatbot with a wallet. Structured, reliable data feeds are what make agents actually useful. The data layer is the infrastructure that unlocks the agentic economy.
Institutions are moving quickly, yet deliberately. Tokenized funds, stablecoin payments, compliance reporting, regulated entities are moving assets onchain and they bring expectations shaped by traditional finance. Downtime isn't an option, inconsistent data is a compliance risk, the infrastructure has to meet certain standards.
We've Seen This Before
Financial markets got Bloomberg, one terminal that pulled together fragmented data feeds into a single, reliable interface. E-commerce got Stripe, one API that replaced the mess of payment processing. The early web got managed hosting and content delivery networks so every company didn't have to run its own servers.
Blockchain is at that same inflection point.
What We're Building
At Hgraph, this is what we work on every day. We believe managed, multi-chain data infrastructure, with real SLAs, consistent schemas, and production-grade reliability, is going to power everything that sits on top. That's what we're building.
We run our own bare-metal infrastructure, index multiple chains, and serve production data through GraphQL, REST, JSON-RPC, and SQL.
Teams like rwa.xyz, Ledger, Hashgraph, HashPack, and Bonzo Finance rely on our data layer. They're building real products, tokenized asset platforms, hardware wallets, DeFi protocols, analytics tools, and they need their data infrastructure to work. We think the next wave of blockchain apps will be powered by the data layer, which is why we're building it right now.