Seven Strong: Pinax Credits Resilience and Determination for Success

Our story begins with seven passionate people and a shared mission.

TL;DR: Discover Pinax’s origin story—how we developed our blockchain data analytics and processing expertise to become a world-class web3 data streaming provider and core devs working on The Graph.

Today, Pinax is a web3 data provider with a multi-chain vision. We offer fast and reliable access to blockchain data. Our goal is to help builders create amazing experiences for their communities with our data indexing tools.

But how did we get here?

Discover the story behind Pinax—how we began as a blockchain validator, expanded our skills to run our own bare metal infrastructure, and then broadened our scope to form Pinax, core devs working on The Graph.

To understand the whole story, let’s go back to when the co-founders met and started their first venture.

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A lot of people, when I tell them seven co-founders, are like, ‘Wow, there must be a lot of conflict there. I’ve never heard of a company with seven co-founders. That’s crazy.’ But honestly, I think it may be one of our biggest strengths that got us through some of the toughest times in some of the lowest markets because we did it together.

Daniel Keyes, CEO

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A meeting of like minds

We began with a group of like-minded people passionate about blockchain technology. At the time, the co-founders were interested in the EOS chain because of its speed, performance, and reliability.

They wanted to discuss this technology and its potential with others who were interested, and they eventually connected through community forums and pub nights.

EOS Nation is born

In February 2018, the seven entrepreneurs decided to form a block producer (or validator) in the EOS ecosystem. They publicly announced EOS Nation that March and played a critical role in the launch of the network.

The co-founders fully self-funded this operation and shared the workload as they were able. Initially, some worked full-time, and others worked part-time in addition to their full-time jobs.

The co-founders

• Daniel Keyes, CEO
• Matthew Darwin, CIO
• Stéphane Bisson, CMO
• Yves La Rose, Co-founder
• Denis Carrière, CTO
• Vincent Grenier, CFO
• David Requenez, Director of Video Production

Note: The titles above are listed as they are currently.

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I’m very lucky to have seven co-founders who were all very much aligned and willing to come along that journey with me. If it wasn’t for the fact that I had them there to do this with me, to have my back, I don’t think I would’ve made the decision to make the leap to entrepreneur.

Daniel Keyes

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EOS Nation’s mission

EOS Nation focused on supporting web3 communities with reliable infrastructure and collaborating to build needed tools and resources.

We started as a validator in the cloud. Then, we began running bare metal infrastructure in our own data centers, developing our skills to run it independently and reliably.

Early on, we collaborated with the StreamingFast team (then known as dfuse). They built a scalable open-source platform for searching and processing blockchain data also called dfuse, and we became the sole operator of this technology.

Built up technical skills over time

We operated dfuse for several years at production grade with no downtime, becoming experts as we expanded our hardware and data centers.

Along the way, we built other tools to leverage blockchain data and help the ecosystem grow, like:

• EOS Detective transfers network graph
• Pomelo Grants crowdfunding platform
• Pomelo Bounties freelance marketplace
• Spyglass transaction lookup
• API+ working group

EOS Nation remains a top-ranked block producer for the EOS, WAX, Telos, and Ultra blockchains.

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When I joined the other co-founders at EOS Nation, it wasn’t just me being an entrepreneur. There was a group of us who were entrepreneurs together. So that provided a lot of support, especially for all the things that I was not good at or didn’t want to do. I could focus on being an entrepreneur for the part that I’m good at.

Matthew Darwin, CIO

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Fostered community growth and education

We also worked to spread awareness of web3 technology and its potential through community-building projects:

• Ambassadors Program members were passionate EOS fans who fostered their local communities by hosting meetups, making educational content, attending conferences, and hosting live events.
• EOS Nation meetups were get-togethers in different countries, spreading EOS knowledge and growing local communities.
• Hot Sauce Live Show was the longest-running weekly news show, reporting all the latest developments in the EOS ecosystem.

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Co-founder, Stéphane Bisson, on the Ambassadors Program:

Working with passionate crypto enthusiasts from around the world, who, while coming from wildly different backgrounds, all wanted to work toward a common goal, was one of the most rewarding projects I’ve ever worked on.

It’s incredible how quickly things like geographical borders can melt away when you connect with others on a shared vision.

Stéphane Bisson, CMO

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Pinax is born

Pinax was founded in May 2022 (with the same team) because we pivoted our focus to offer data services for more blockchains. The future is multi-chain.

Drawing on our expertise in our existing indexing, analytics, and search tools (like operating dfuse), Pinax focused on supporting data streaming. The platform dfuse evolved into Firehose and Substreams, and as we were already experts in that tech stack, we were the ideal team to operate this groundbreaking technology.

We provide real-time data indexing through Firehose and Substreams and offer RPC endpoints with full archive data and complete historical depth. Our analytics service is coming soon.

• Firehose
• Substreams
• RPC
• Analytics (coming soon)

💡 Pinax (singular of Pinakes from Ancient Greek) A term first created in the Library of Alexandria for the earliest historical storage base of human knowledge and culture, popularly considered to be the first library catalog.

Pinax’s mission is to support creators

Our mission is to enable creators to achieve their true potential with web3 technology, and we want to make that tech easy for everyone to access, no matter their technical background.

• We’re constantly adding more chains to our Firehose, Substreams, and RPC endpoints that you can access directly, and we’ve made it easier to manage these services with our app.
• We support blockchain-agnostic Firehose and Substreams technology on The Graph.
• We help educate the web3 community, training developers to master web3 and incorporate this next-generation technology into their projects.
  • Check out our YouTube channel for videos on using Firehose and Substreams.

Our culture values resilience, independence + collaboration, accessibility, and openness. We create a work environment that reflects these values for our team members and customers, who are all creators.

Working on The Graph

We’ve been contributors to The Graph since we started operating as Pinax in July 2022. The Graph Foundation recognized our contributions as essential, and in July 2023, we became core devs working on The Graph.

We’re proud of our contributions so far:

• We’re working to add more chains to The Graph Network by helping to provide infrastructure to enable new blockchains to be integrated as data sources.
• We’re bringing new data services to the network, operating Firehose and Substreams, and helping indexers and developers leverage this technology more easily.
• We’re producing educational and promotional resources, such as blog posts, tutorials, videos, and sample code, that we share to benefit others.
• We’re jumping in to build what’s needed. The most recent chapter of our story involves saving the blobs.

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We’re going to spend a lot more time building tools to make it easier to use Substreams. Up until now, the question has been, how do we run Substreams as an indexer? Now, it’s as developers, how do you use Substreams? So we’re going to expand in that space.

That means writing more example code, doing demos and podcasts, showing up at conferences, and these kinds of things. So it’s all around Firehose and Substreams, what we’re doing inside Pinax. And we’ll keep expanding that scope depending on whatever’s needed at the time.

Matthew Darwin

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What’s next?

We’ll continue to show up every day and work hard, looking to our values to guide the way.

We invite you to follow along with our story on X, or even better, try our services—you can get started for free!

💡 This article answers questions like:
- Who is Pinax? 
- Who are the co-founders of Pinax?
- What does Pinax do with blockchain data?
- What is Pinax's role as a core dev working on The Graph?