🖼️Background

A. Existing Indexing Technology

Many emerging technologies—such as Solana’s virtual machine, zero-knowledge proofs, and rollups—show great promise for scaling block production. Yet, one critical aspect of scalability often goes unnoticed: reliable, well-organized access to on-chain data. Current indexing solutions can be slow, complex, non-composable, and frequently centralized.

Whether it’s gaming, finance, NFTs, or social Dapps, all rely on on-chain data for insights like TVL updates, NFT metadata, and account token balances. The process of retrieving this information is known as querying. Figure 2.1 below offers a simplified illustration of how data is indexed and queried from the blockchain.

Figure 2.1 Data being indexed from a blockchain

Today’s infrastructure for indexing is antiquated and not built for high-throughput use cases. Most existing solutions were designed with general-purpose applications in mind and fail to deliver the performance required by modern, data-intensive workloads. Additionally, developer tooling remains cumbersome, offering few conveniences for rapid testing and iteration.

To build and validate queries for their Dapps, developers currently must index the entire blockchain—a process that can take days or even weeks, depending on chain size. Services like The Graph, a popular indexing solution, can require several weeks just to index Ethereum mainnet. This lengthy process impedes development, forcing repeated full-index cycles whenever new queries are deployed or existing ones need debugging, thereby prolonging time to market.

By contrast, Cido employs a quantum-optimized approach—rapidly tackling the very bottlenecks that plague these traditional indexing pipelines. Through advanced QUBO-based workflows, Cido seeks to dramatically shorten indexing times while offering a more modular, developer-friendly environment that supports the next generation of high-throughput blockchain applications.

By comparison, Cido can achieve indexing speeds 50× faster than current market solutions—enabling entire blockchains to be indexed in hours instead of weeks. In addition, The Graph (and similar providers) typically exhibit latencies of ~300 ms under ideal conditions, which can degrade further based on network specifics and query complexity. This heightened latency leads to slower, less responsive UIs and a suboptimal user experience. By contrast, Cido’s live demo showcases latencies 7× lower than The Graph, along with indexing speeds 100× higher.

Not only does Cido improve speed, but it also reduces costs. Thanks to our QUBO-based quantum annealing workflows, we deliver high performance while efficiently managing resource usage—even in demanding applications. This efficiency translates into both lower developer overhead and a superior UX, allowing for more intuitive interfaces and smoother cross-chain functionality. In financial use cases (e.g., on-chain perpetual futures DEXs or liquidation markets), lower latency can even create arbitrage opportunities.

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B. Competition

Cido stands apart by offering robust performance without critical trade-offs. Competitors that surpass The Graph’s speed often do so through centralization or by omitting crucial features—such as RPC calls, necessary to display wallet balances in real time. Below is a comparison table of estimated pricing, latency, and indexing speeds (excluding RPC calls).

In internal tests—including RPC calls—Cido processed an average of 5,000 events per second, approximately 200× faster than The Graph’s 90 events per second. Theoretically, excluding RPC calls would allow for even higher throughput; those results are forthcoming.

Indexer	Estimated Pricing	Latency	Indexing Speeds (events/s)	Centralized?
Cido	$250/m	<50 ms	*5,000	No
Envio	$350/m	>500 ms	9,000	Yes
Flair	$100/m	1–2 s	90,000	Yes
SubSquid	$540/m	~3 sec	4,000	No
The Graph	$240/m	~300 ms	90	No

Through a quantum-classical synergy, Cido delivers unmatched indexing speed and low latency—without compromising on decentralization or functionality.