We will host your hackathon nest. Free, the same day.
If you are building at a hackathon and an indexing quota is between you and your demo, send us a message. We will build the nest from your contracts, test it, and host it on our own box for the duration, with no key, no quota and no bill. This post is what that meant in practice today, so you know what you are asking for.
The ask, and the arithmetic behind it
At 12:29 a builder at ETHOnline asked The Graph’s Discord for “a massively increased rate limit for the next week”. His app polled his Sepolia and Arc Testnet subgraphs seven times every five seconds, six of them follow-ups whenever it spotted a trade to fill, and ran out of quota in under an hour. The development query URL that serves an unpublished subgraph allows 3,000 queries a day; he needed about 120,000. Arc Testnet has no paid tier to buy, because the network does not support it. No amount of asking nicely closes a factor of forty on an endpoint built for smoke tests.
What he sent, and what we found
Four contract addresses on Arc Testnet with start blocks, at 13:32. None of the four was verified on the explorer or on Sourcify, so there was no ABI to decode with. His repository was public, and it carried the subgraph manifests for both chains and the three ABI files, so we took them from there; he sent the same three files an hour later and they declared the same events, signature for signature.
Then the explorer answered a question nobody had asked. Across all four contracts, over their whole history, the chain held thirty logs. He was being rate-limited polling thirty events.
What got built
Two nests, one per chain, because his intents are created on Sepolia and filled and settled on Arc.
Each has 33 tables, one per event in the ABIs, and six SQL views that reproduce his five GraphQL
entities and the pending-intents query his agent polls, by name: intents, fills, settlements,
vault, protocol_state, pending_intents. The vault view folds deposits, withdrawals, advances and
reimbursements with the same arithmetic as his mapping, and on Arc it reads a liquid balance of
100,004,000 base units: the deposit, plus one reimbursement, minus one advance, to the unit.
Every one of the twenty distinct event topics observed on Arc matched an event in his ABIs. The Sepolia nest caught up its 21,000 blocks in three seconds. The Arc nest caught up its 500,000 in about three minutes, once we stopped asking its public endpoint the wrong way.
The part that fought back
Arc Testnet’s two public RPC endpoints enforce a sliding quota that a cold start drains, and nuthatch read the resulting 429s as “the range is too large”, halved its window five times in fourteen seconds and gave up. That is our bug, now #1297, and it is the kind of bug a hackathon finds for you: public testnet endpoints are where the assumptions in an RPC client go to be tested. dRPC’s public Arc endpoint, which serves 5,120-block windows without complaint, and a 4,000-block window made it a non-event.
What he got
Two URLs on our Helsinki box, each an HTTP API taking read-only SQL, with Access-Control-Allow-Origin
set so his front end can call them straight from the browser:
https://hackathon.89.167.109.4.sslip.io/arcaidia-arc/sql?q=SELECT * FROM pending_intents
https://hackathon.89.167.109.4.sslip.io/arcaidia-sepolia/sql?q=SELECT * FROM protocol_stateAnd a repository, nightswatchhq/arcaidia-nest,
with both configs, the views, and a README that shows each of his four subgraph queries as the SQL
that answers it, every example run against the live nests before it was written down. If our box
goes away, the nest does not: nuthatch init --from that repository and it runs on his laptop.
From his first message at 12:29 to both URLs answering at 14:12 was under two hours, forty minutes of it after he sent the addresses, and most of that spent on the RPC and on reading his mappings so the views would be right rather than merely present.
Why we do this
It is not charity, or not only. A nest built for a stranger’s contracts under a deadline is the most honest test we have: it uses the importer, the unlisted-chain path, the doctor, the views, the deploy, and the public RPCs of a chain we had never touched, in one afternoon, with someone waiting. Today it found a real defect and two documentation lies. A week of our own testing would not have.
So the offer stands, and it is not limited to The Graph’s hackathons. Testnet, mainnet, any EVM chain with a public RPC. Send the addresses and the chain to the Night’s Watch Discord. If your contracts are unverified, send the ABIs too, or a link to the repo. We will tell you honestly if it will not work, and if it will, you will have a URL the same day.