Subsquid Dev Log #8

4 min readMar 28, 2022

The Squid dev team might have been silent for a while, but that does not mean it has stopped working! As a matter of fact, there’s plenty of good news to share with our wonderful community.

There’s been quite a lot of announcements since the last Dev Log, such as our collaboration with Moonbeam, about which we are super excited, and a very interesting partnership with Polkadot India. Subsquid continues to advance by adding new and exciting features, as well as by consolidating and improving existing ones.

Subsquid promotes contributions

Before discussing our latest accomplishments, we wanted to talk about the steps Subsquid is taking towards becoming a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO).

As is already well-known, our project is Open Source. Everyone and anyone can take a look at the code in our repository. Open Source projects usually encourage participation from their communities. We are already doing this, through our Team Abyss, as well as through ‘quests.’

Today, we would like to go even further and invite our users to report issues, suggest improvements and — for those who feel up to the task — directly contribute to the project by taking on open Issues and proposing changes, in the form of Pull Requests. We believe this approach will be an essential part of our growth. We need to hear your voice and we need your participation in order to build the Data Backbone for Polkadot!

To incentivise such contributions we’ll be offering economic rewards to repay your hard work. Please allow us to take a moment to explain the system we have put in place to manage all of this:

Inspired by similar projects, we have added a series of labels that describe properties. The image above shows how we intend to define rewards for proposing a solution to an Issue, while the one below shows how we would like to describe the priority of an Issue.

All of this, and general guidelines on how to contribute to our project, are explained in the CONTRIBUTING.md file, which is part of the repository.

In the coming weeks the number of open issues will start to increase as we open up more and more to our community. We hope you will be participating. Let’s build Subsquid DAO together!

Official release of our EVM Processor

While it has been discussed and described in a few announcements, it has finally gotten to see the light of day: our wondrous substrate-evm-processor has officially been released, and it’s available as an npm package. Let us please reiterate one more time how proud we are to take one more step towards interoperability and how important it is for us to give another key tool to Web3 builders by providing support for EVM logs.

Our documentation has a dedicated section that goes into further detail on how all of this works. Check it out!

We’ve added a slew of built-in types

One of the most important yet annoying and time-consuming activities to build a squid is sourcing types bundles. It can be a slog, especially if the blockchain we are trying to work on does not have an npm package, or if it has not been added to the polkadot.js library.

One of our main objectives at Subsquid is to make developers’ life easier, which is why we are constantly adding built-in types bundles to support more and more blockchains with our project. Our latest release adds a substantial amount of these to our supported list, and we are looking forward to adding more.

Additional Storage items type-safe interfaces support

In the previous Dev Log we described the added ability to access Runtime Storage through Subsquid. We promised that we’d expand on that — and we did!

With the latest releases, we have added support for type-safe interface generation for Storage items, which are now ‘first class citizens’, just the same as Events and Extrinsics. It is possible to read more about this in our documentation, which has been updated for the occasion.

Want to find out more about Subsquid? Join us on our Discord server, visit our website, or check out one of these resources: