Written by @dizhel, SQD Co-Founder
In early January 2026, Subsquid Labs launched the first Portal Revenue Pools in beta. The mechanism enables SQD holders to lock SQD behind a Portal that serves real paying demand, and receive USDT-nominated rewards funded by those Portal fees. The goal: shift protocol rewards away from pure inflation toward actual usage-generated revenue — without requiring all end users to adopt crypto payment systems.
Key Design Choices
Fiat-Based Fee Structure: Portal fees come from data consumers paying in fiat or stablecoins. This reduces friction for teams needing predictable billing while keeping SQD essential to capacity and security.
Substantiated Rewards: Up to 50% of USDT fees from a Portal flow to independently managed Portal pools distributed to SQD lockers, with remaining fees supporting network incentives and long-term supply management.
Scalable Pool Model: Rather than one centralized rewards pool, the program expands through multiple pools mapped to different demand profiles. The initial launch is intentionally capped and expandable to maintain stable reward distribution while testing the mechanism.
Portal Is the Gateway, but the Moat Is the Network
Portal serves as a high-performance data gateway for the SQD Network, connecting data consumers to decentralized workers through streaming HTTP APIs combining historical and real-time data.
Defensibility Through Decentralization
Capacity-Metering: Bandwidth allocation directly correlates to SQD locked to a Portal’s on-chain identity. Greater throughput requires provisioning more collateral.
Worker Network Strength: The SQD Network runs over 2,000 decentralized workers. Each worker bonds 100,000 SQD with slashing conditions for documented violations.
This architecture creates genuine defensibility: in centralized data systems, the API boundary is the chokepoint — whoever controls it can change pricing, throttle workloads, or deprecate features. The SQD model keeps the API (Portal) open-source while the scarce resource — network capacity from thousands of independent operators — remains protected under shared incentive structures.
What Scale Looks Like in Practice
Network metrics demonstrate real adoption:
- 8.61 TB served over 24 hours
- 1.13 PB over 90 days (averaging ~12.5 TB/day)
- 4.6M queries over 24 hours
- 424.68M queries over 90 days
Scale is the moat — and it’s already visible: a high-bandwidth, low-friction query surface backed by a large decentralized operator set is hard to replicate quickly.
Portal Revenue Pools strategically align with growth because capacity provisioning through locked SQD and fee-funded rewards transforms scaling from internal spending into a market dynamic between demand (clients) and supply (lockers and workers).
Beyond Blockchain Data: Expanding the Total Addressable Market
Today’s primary workload involves on-chain data across hundreds of networks, particularly Solana, formatted for application backends and analytics.
The broader opportunity extends beyond blockchain archives. Workers function as distributed storage and compute nodes in a protocolized marketplace. Supporting additional database shapes over time — including those for AI and RAG pipelines — represents the direction of the SQD roadmap emphasizing petabyte-scale, self-sovereign data access and permissionless dataset provisioning.
The buyer profile shifts significantly: the market for verifiable, high-throughput data access in Web2 (analytics, agentic systems, ETL, retrieval) is structurally larger than Web3 indexing. The technical hypothesis holds that primitives strengthening chain data (streaming, bandwidth economics, operator diversity, open gateways) generalize to other high-volume datasets.
Web2 Moving Toward Crypto Rails
Parallel payment infrastructure developments suggest increasing convergence:
- Visa expanded stablecoin settlement capabilities, including USDC settlement for U.S. institutions
- Klarna discussed launching KlarnaUSD with mainnet targeting 2026
- Stripe published stablecoin materials for global businesses
Once stablecoin settlement is normal inside large payment networks, the boundary between “data infrastructure” and “commerce infrastructure” gets thinner. As commerce becomes increasingly programmable, it demands superior data quality and verification primitives.
Rezolve AI’s acquisition of Subsquid Labs reflects this integration thesis: combining decentralized data infrastructure with payment rails and commerce distribution.
Why SQD Is Not Optional to the Architecture
SQD functions as the coordination asset converting a distributed worker network into provisioned capacity:
- Workers bond in SQD
- Portals receive bandwidth based on locked SQD
- Revenue Pools distribute stablecoin rewards to SQD lockers underwriting Portal capacity
This combination creates genuine defensibility. When functioning correctly, demand generates fees, fees create rewards, rewards justify additional locked SQD and operator participation, and the network strengthens in capacity, resilience, and service quality.
The shape of the system is now coherent: an open gateway layer, a bonded worker network, and a revenue mechanism that can directly connect enterprise adoption to protocol rewards.
Execution risks remain substantial — scaling Portals, expanding datasets, and making AI workloads first-class citizens present genuine engineering challenges. However, if it holds, it compounds into a moat.