📝 Editor’s Note: Setting the Scene

This issue of OurNetwork is covering Data Protocols, defined as blockchain-based projects which either store or transmit data as their primary value proposition.

Oracles, which provide off-chain data to smart contracts, are a key subcategory in the data protocols space. The technology is also crucially important — oracles' secure over $60B in value, according to DeFi Llama.

In this issue, OurNetwork will cover a key oracle, which made waves this week when it release a token. Contributors to this issue also covered data protocols at the forefront of data availability, data storage, and data indexing.

Let's get into it.

– ON Editorial Team

The Graph | Celestia | Arweave | RedStone | Covalent

• Query volume on The Graph, the powerhouse of decentralized data indexing, experienced explosive growth in 2024, reaching 5.95B queries in Q4 2024, a more than 980% increase from Q4 2023, which had 958M. The Q4 2024 figure is also a 8,000%+ surge from Q1 2022, which had 73M queries. Each quarter in 2024 had record-breaking usage, with queries nearly doubling each quarter. This sustained momentum highlights The Graph’s expanding adoption and its role as essential data infrastructure, consistently powering web3 dapps through its decentralized network.

• The Graph's median latency remains efficient as query volume surges. In Q4 2024, latency improved to 140 milliseconds from 188.9 milliseconds in Q2 2024, a 26% reduction in two quarters. Despite an almost 10x year-over-year query increase, performance remains strong, reinforcing The Graph’s scalability and commitment to efficiency.

• The Graph maintains a 99.4%+ gateway success rate despite massive query growth, showcasing strong reliability. Q4 2024 achieved a 99.45% success rate, up from 99.22% in Q1 2024, reflecting improved stability and reliable performance as query demand surged.

• Celestia currently accounts for 90% of the data posted on Layer 2s with 25GB stored in comparison to ETHs 2.2GB on a daily basis. In February alone over 680GB were posted on Celestia — that's up by 600% in comparison to December 24.

• For fees the picture is the reverse — in terms of data availability fees, Celestia only accounts for roughly 10% of fees in comparison to Ethereum's 90%. In February, Celestia had $50k in fees and Ethereum had $780k. Interestingly, the fees for Ethereum are only one fourth of what they were in December 2024 and while fees doubled for Celestia in that time frame.

• Of Celestia's data posted, Eclipse, a Layer 2 blockchain, is the biggest consumer with 580GB in February, or 80% of all storage. Eclipse's data posted to Celestia has quintupled since December, but their relative share of data posted to the data availability solution actually went down. This is because smaller projects are outpacing Eclipse in terms of the rate of data posted to Celestia.

• Fees paid per megabyte (MB) stored went down $0.08 for Celestia from $2 in May 2024. In comparison one MB stored on Ethereum blobs costs $10 and one on ETH calldata, an older form of data availability, costs $60. This becomes even more noteworthy as Celestia's storage cost halved since December 2024 while the fees paid roughly tripled in the same time frame.

• Arweave is a decentralized protocol enabling permanent data storage. Arweave users pay a one-time, up-front fee to store their data permanently — this pay-once, store-forever model enables a suite of net new applications and use cases. Arweave has seen an explosion of activity reaching an all-time-high of 1.3B monthly transactions in February 2025. February's monthly transaction count is up roughly double year-over-year.

• Users uploaded 16.95 TiB of data to Arweave in February 2025, an all-time high, up ~31% month-over-month and a multiple of 3 year-over-year. AO, a general purpose decentralized computer built atop Arweave, is driving data upload growth.

• Record data uploads create deflationary pressure for the AR token - AR is locked in an endowment fund, now at 151.7k AR, effectively reducing circulating supply while creating sustainable storage economics. Endowment growth was up ~51% month-over-month in February 2025, accelerating significantly in the past months.

• RedStone is the fastest-growing oracle, specializing in yield-bearing collateral for DeFi, like liquid staking tokens (LSTs), liquid restaking tokens (LRTs), and Bitcoin LSTs. Clients trusting RedStone include DeFi mainstays like Pendle, Morpho, Venus, Spark, Ether.fi, Ethena, Lombard & more. In the past week, RedStone has climbed to top three by Crypto Twitter, mindshare, following a number of high caliber integrations and Binance's announcement to list RedStone's RED token.

• Spark, Resolv, Euler, CIAN, Gearbox are just a few DeFi protocols contributing to the $6B+ total value secured (TVS) RedStone has amassed during its 1,200% year-over-year growth. RedStone is available across over 70 chains, and is a launch partner for networks like Berachain, Unichain, Story, Sonic, Monad, and MegaETH.

• RedStone used Binance's Pre-Market Price-Cap mechanism for its launch. In the first 24 hours, the market had a cap of $0.4 per token, followed by $0.6 after 24 hours, and then $0.8. On each occasion, there were at least $10M worth of buy orders with small size executions of 20-250 tokens.

• Covalent is a project which simplifies access to blockchain data on behalf of both developers and AIs. The Covalent API is averaging +2M calls per day currently with 95% of those being paid. Looking at credits used paints a similar picture with 200M-300M premium credits being used and 7-15M free credits being used.

• 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 3M CXT have been bought back through API-generated revenue, accounting for over $300k, 0.67%, of the current market capitalization of the token.

• The CXT Price is currently at $0.05. That's down by roughly 50% since start of the year, which is equal to the average drawdown of data service tokens. The impact of the CXT buybacks is interesting — they coincided with a price bump of 50% in September 2024.

• Currently 285M CXT —32% of the circulating supply— are staked. Reward redemptions have stabilized around 180k since the start of the year after spiking around 800k in mid December. This tops the previous all-time high by 20%.