Helium vs The Graph

Helium's original Layer-1 blockchain was retired in an April 2023 migration to Solana, and the network's chain data now ships only as bulk Postgres/CSV snapshots over torrent or a requestor-pays S3 bucket rather than a queryable API. The one remaining live HTTP endpoint is the free Entity API, which returns a Hotspot's owner, asserted (H3-obfuscated) location, and on-chain asset IDs by wallet public key. It carries no uptime guarantee and is meant for light lookups, not production traffic.

The Graph indexes onchain data into open GraphQL subgraphs that any client can query through its hosted Gateway, covering Ethereum and dozens of other networks without a per-chain node integration. The Gateway requires a bearer token issued from Subgraph Studio, billed on a usage-based model with a free monthly query allowance before paid billing applies. Every query and response travels as GraphQL over HTTPS.