Direct Grant Application
Livepeer Subgraph Audit Proposal
1. Applicant + Payout Details
- Applicant: BuildersDAO
- Main contact: James (
jmulq) - Payment address:
0x615fd4ed2cd90b8d33d2eb2e3df663f9722246b5on Arbitrum
2. Scope
Problem Statement
The Livepeer subgraph is core ecosystem infrastructure. It supports Explorer views, governance surfaces, delegator tooling, and tokenomics analysis across the Livepeer ecosystem.
The subgraph has not yet had a structured audit, so Livepeer lacks a current baseline for its indexing performance and subgraph size, as well as a clear picture of current technical debt, data model issues, and indexing gaps. This creates risk when adding new features, because new indexing work may build on top of unmeasured or unresolved technical debt.
The current roadmap identifies per round delegator and orchestrator stake and earnings as an important indexing gap for income, tax reporting, and time-series views. Recent subgraph issues, including an edge case that caused indexers to error and affected delegator withdrawals, also reinforce the need for a comprehensive audit. Auditing the current subgraph first will give Livepeer a clearer foundation for future remediation and feature work, including known data discrepancies, non-deterministic indexing risks, technical debt, and schema constraints.
Proposed Solution
BuildersDAO will perform a focused technical audit of the Livepeer subgraph.
The audit will review the current codebase, schema, manifest, mapping logic, protocol coverage, query suitability, testing setup, maintainability, and failure-prone indexing patterns. The final output will be a structured audit report with prioritised findings, evidence, and recommended remediation steps.
This proposal is audit-only. Remediation PRs, InfraDAO indexing benchmarks, and implementation of per round stake/earnings indexing can be funded separately after the findings are triaged.
As part of the audit, BuildersDAO will hold one 60 minute community session with relevant Livepeer maintainers, ecosystem contributors, and active subgraph users. The goal is to gather known pain points, recurring data discrepancies, unreported issues, important query paths, and context from teams that have worked around subgraph limitations. Input from this session will inform the audit focus and be reflected in the final report where relevant.
Where useful, BuildersDAO will support findings with selected evidence checks against important subgraph entities, known transactions, provided datasets, chain logs, or contract state. These checks are intended to help identify and evidence specific issues; they are not exhaustive data reconciliation or a guarantee that every historical record is correct.
In Scope
- Comprehensive subgraph audit covering repository setup, protocol coverage, schema, manifest, mappings, query suitability, testing, indexing performance, storage, and maintainability
- InfraDAO baseline indexing metrics for the current subgraph
- One community input session with interested maintainers, ecosystem contributors, and active subgraph users to gather recurring pain points, known discrepancies, unreported issues, and priority query/use-case needs.
- Review of known data accuracy concerns or discrepancies raised by ecosystem contributors, using provided examples, datasets, endpoints, transactions, or account histories where available.
- Selected evidence checks for important entities, queries, events, or protocol flows where useful.
- Audit report and community retro post
Out Of Scope
- Remediation PRs
- Full implementation of per round delegator/orchestrator stake and earnings
- Local or CI-based full indexing benchmarks
- Exhaustive historical reconciliation of every indexed record
Dependencies / Assumptions
- Livepeer confirms the repository branch, deployment hash, and subgraph endpoint.
- Livepeer maintainers provide important Explorer/product queries where available.
- Livepeer helps identify and invite relevant contributors or users for the community input session, such as Explorer maintainers, data consumers, and contributors who have previously worked around subgraph limitations.
- Livepeer maintainers and ecosystem contributors provide any known subgraph data discrepancies, alternative indexed datasets, relevant endpoints, or account/transaction examples that can be used as evidence during review.
- InfraDAO is available to run indexing benchmarks in a consistent environment.
- Livepeer maintainers will confirm whether any findings should be treated as sensitive before public GitHub issues are created.
- This audit will identify and prioritise remediation work, but implementation is not included in this grant.
3. Deliverables + Acceptance Criteria
Deliverable 1: Final Audit Report + Baseline Metrics
Acceptance criteria:
- Current Livepeer subgraph is reviewed across schema, manifest, mappings, protocol coverage, query suitability, performance risks, and testing/CI.
- Recent and known incident contexts are reviewed where relevant to identify related classes of risk, including:
- The recent unhandled null / indexer error incident that affected delegator withdrawals.
- Prior reports of non-deterministic indexing behaviour where context is available.
- Known data discrepancies or accuracy concerns raised by Livepeer maintainers or ecosystem contributors.
- InfraDAO baseline metrics are collected for the current subgraph.
- Findings are documented with severity, evidence, and recommendations.
- Findings are classified as:
- Critical production / indexing risk
- Non-breaking remediation
- Breaking/schema-impacting
- Future feature work
- Larger redesign
- Final audit report includes:
- Audited commit and scope
- Methodology
- Prioritised findings table
- Detailed findings with evidence and recommendations
- Protocol coverage notes or matrix where useful
- Selected evidence check notes where useful
- Query suitability notes
- Incident-related risk notes where applicable
- Remaining risks and future work
- Public GitHub issues or milestone items are created for non-sensitive findings where useful. Findings considered sensitive by Livepeer maintainers will remain in the report or be shared through the appropriate private channel.
- Final forum update/retro is published documenting the audit output and recommended next steps.
4. Milestones + Payment Tranches
Total grant request: $6,500 USD-equivalent in LPT
This includes the required 10% allocation for reporting, retroactive post, and community engagement.
| Milestone | What Will Be Delivered | Verification Method | Target Date | Payout Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Final subgraph audit report, baseline metrics, forum retro post | Final report delivered, findings documented with severity/evidence/recommendations, issues or milestone items linked where useful, forum update published | End of Week 2 | $6,500 |
5. Update Cadence
- Cadence: Lightweight updates as needed during the 2-week audit.
- Working channel: Private Discord coordination with Livepeer maintainers.
- Community input: One 60-minute input session during the audit window, open to relevant maintainers, ecosystem contributors, and active users suggested by Livepeer.
- Public update: Final forum update/retro published on completion.
Updates may include:
- Open questions
- Blockers
- Urgent findings
- Scope risks
- Expected completion timing
Given the short audit timeline, ongoing public progress updates are not expected unless the audit is delayed or a material issue is found.
6. Budget + Use Of Funds
| Category | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Audit and technical review | $5,700 | Protocol coverage, schema, manifest, mappings, query suitability, testing/CI, indexing resilience, recent incident review, selected evidence checks, and maintainability review |
| Coordination and reporting | $800 | Maintainer coordination, final audit report, and forum update/retro |
| Total | $6,500 | Paid in LPT using the Direct Grant conversion process |
7. Impact
Expected Impact
If successful, this grant will give Livepeer a clear, prioritised view of the current subgraph’s correctness risks, technical debt, indexing gaps, production failure risks, and future remediation priorities.
Expected outcomes:
- Current indexing gaps, technical debt, and data-model risks are identified and prioritised.
- The recent class of null-handling/indexing-failure issue is reviewed for related risks.
- Livepeer has baseline indexing metrics from a consistent InfraDAO environment.
- Livepeer has a remediation backlog that can be used to fund or assign follow-on fixes.
How Impact Will Be Evidenced
Impact will be evidenced by:
- Final audit report
- Prioritised findings table
- Detailed findings with evidence and recommendations
- InfraDAO baseline
- GitHub issues or milestone items where useful
- Final forum update/retro
Risks + Mitigations
-
Risk: Some data correctness concerns require broader historical reconciliation to prove fully.
Mitigation: The audit will use selected evidence checks where useful, but exhaustive reconciliation is out of scope and will be documented separately if needed.
-
Risk: Missing context from maintainers or downstream consumers limits parts of the protocol coverage or query suitability review.
Mitigation: BuildersDAO will request key queries, known discrepancies, incident context, and relevant examples at kickoff. If some context is unavailable, assumptions and limitations will be documented in the report.
-
Risk: The audit identifies urgent production issues before the final report is complete.
Mitigation: Critical findings will be surfaced to Livepeer maintainers as soon as they are identified rather than waiting for the final report.
8. Prior Work + Relevant Context
BuildersDAO has experience building, auditing, and improving subgraphs with a focus on schema design, mapping correctness, protocol coverage, performance, maintainability, and The Graph best practices.
BuildersDAO is well suited to this work because:
- BuildersDAO has previously contributed review work around the Livepeer subgraph through PR#168 and PR#175.
- The team has domain experience with subgraph auditing
- InfraDAO can provide practical indexer-side benchmark data
- The output directly supports future Livepeer subgraph work, including per round stake and earnings indexing.
Team
BuildersDAO is the applicant and accountable delivery entity. The named contributors below are included for transparency and community review.
-
James M — Project Lead / Audit Reviewer
James will coordinate the grant, manage Livepeer communication, maintain the GitHub milestone, review audit findings and support technical delivery where needed, and own the final report and retro post.
Relevant background: James has 9 years of software development experience, including several years working in web3 infrastructure and The Graph ecosystem. He has led and contributed to subgraph audits, ground-up subgraph builds, optimisation work applying The Graph best practices, bespoke Substreams data pipelines, and Rust/Elixir-based data systems. He is especially focused on making indexed data accurate, efficient to serve, easy to maintain, and practical for real product use cases.
-
Shashwat D — Auditor & Engineer
Shashwat will contribute to auditing the Livepeer subgraph schema, manifest, mapping logic, and protocol coverage.
Relevant background: Shashwat has 6 years of software development experience, specializing in data indexing infrastructure, multi-chain data extraction, and standardised protocol tracking within The Graph ecosystem. As an open-source contributor to Messari, he designed and implemented production subgraphs for high-volume DeFi and streaming protocols—including Livepeer, GMX, and Ribbon—authoring custom AssemblyScript mappings and an open-source SDK to normalise heterogeneous smart contract events into unified schemas for institutional analytics. His infrastructure work extends to Graph BuildersDAO, where he engineered high-performance data pipelines utilising both Subgraphs and Rust-based Substreams to process millions of on-chain events daily.
-
Ciaran L — Auditor & Engineer
Ciaran will contribute to auditing the Livepeer subgraph schema, manifest, mapping logic, and protocol coverage.
Relevant background: Ciaran has 6 years of software development and data engineering experience. Formerly working in biotech, he has recently moved into the web3 space, where he has contributed to Operations, Business Development and subgraph auditing efforts at BuildersDAO.
-
InfraDAO — Indexing Benchmark Partner
InfraDAO will run baseline indexing benchmarks in a consistent environment and provide sync, entity count, and subgraph size metrics.
Relevant background: InfraDAO operates indexing infrastructure and can provide indexer-side measurements that are more representative than local-only benchmarking.
9. Network Engineering SPE Rubric Fit
Primary Eligibility Area
- Tooling & Infrastructure
This grant fits Tooling & Infrastructure because the Livepeer subgraph is shared ecosystem data infrastructure used by Explorer, governance, delegator tooling, and analytics surfaces.
Design Principles Check
-
Community-originated
Comes from a Livepeer roadmap item (
Subgraph Audit & Stake/Earnings Indexing) identifying the need for subgraph audit, benchmarking, and stake/earnings readiness. -
Pre-agreed pricing
Total grant request is capped at $6,500
-
Impact-linked payment
Payments are tied to a final audit report and retro post.
-
Transparent by default
Work will be coordinated with maintainers during the audit and documented publicly through the final forum update/retro.
-
Speed
Proposed timeline is 2 weeks.
Impact Evidence Plan
-
Named adopters who will use it:
Livepeer subgraph maintainers, Explorer maintainers, governance/data consumers, delegator tooling maintainers, and future subgraph remediation implementers.
-
Downstream dependency:
Explorer views, governance surfaces, delegator tooling, tokenomics analysis, and future per round stake/earnings indexing depend on the subgraph.
-
Capability confirmed in the wild:
The final output will include a published audit report, prioritised findings table, evidence-backed recommendations, and a remediation backlog that can be used to fund or assign follow-on fixes.