Livepeer Subgraph Audit: Final Report and Next Steps
Hey everyone! We have completed the Livepeer Subgraph Audit funded through the Network Engineering SPE Direct Grants programme.
This post provides a high-level summary of the work completed and our recommended next steps. The individual technical findings and supporting evidence are contained in the full audit report rather than repeated here, however we’re happy to discuss any of these findings in detail with the Livepeer community.
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Work Completed
During the engagement, BuildersDAO:
- Reviewed the subgraph’s schema, manifest, mappings, protocol coverage, repository setup, tests, and dependencies.
- Assessed correctness, indexing resilience, maintainability, storage patterns, and adoption of current The Graph features.
- Reviewed relevant Livepeer contracts, historical incidents, repository issues, and previous contributions.
- Held an open community session to gather recurring pain points, reported discrepancies, indexing concerns, and downstream data requirements.
- Reviewed production Explorer queries against the subgraph schema.
- Used query-traffic data courtesy of Ellipfra to understand which queries are used most frequently and where query-serving costs are concentrated.
- Performed selected data checks against the deployed subgraph, contract state, chain data, and the Livepeer Protocol Explorer.
- Coordinated with InfraDAO to establish a point-in-time indexing baseline.
The audit was performed against Livepeer subgraph commit b13e4f2.
High-Level Outcomes
The audit identified findings across a range of severities and areas.
Each finding includes supporting evidence, its likely impact, and a recommended course of action. Findings have also been classified by priority, to assist with planning future remediation work.
The query review also surfaced several Explorer and frontend query opportunities. These have been documented separately from the subgraph findings so that ownership and remediation requirements remain clear.
Indexing Baseline
InfraDAO indexed the current deployment and supplied the following baseline:
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Genesis-to-head sync time | 22 hours, 16 minutes, 26 seconds |
| Total entity count | 1,704,481 |
| Database size | 8.31 GiB |
| Final indexed block | 495,999,604 |
| Indexing errors encountered | None |
This is a point-in-time measurement from one controlled environment. It should be repeated under the same conditions after substantial remediation work to provide a meaningful A/B comparison.
Community and Production Context
The open community session provided great insight from people who maintain, consume, and have previously worked around limitations in the current subgraph. We have used the context from this session to help direct attention towards real concerns and downstream requirements.
Ellipfra also supplied production query-traffic data covering 276,402 queries over an eight-day capture window. This allowed the query suitability review to focus on real usage rather than hypothetical query patterns.
We would be more than happy to coordinate a deeper analysis with Ellipfra if Livepeer finds that useful when prioritising future Explorer or query-performance work.
Limitations
This was an audit-only engagement. It did not include remediation PRs or implementation of per-round delegator and orchestrator stake and earnings indexing.
The data-validation work was targeted and evidence-driven, rather than an exhaustive reconciliation of every historical entity. The report is therefore a technical audit and prioritisation tool, not a certification that every indexed record is historically correct.
Recommended Next Steps
The immediate next step is for Livepeer maintainers and relevant ecosystem contributors to triage the findings and agree on remediation priorities.
From here, we suggest that the issues are batched into several categories of fixes:
- Urgent correctness and reliability fixes
- Compatible, non-breaking improvements (subgraph-only ugrade)
- A coordinated migration for schema-impacting changes
- Explorer and frontend query improvements
- Separate implementation of per-round stake and earnings indexing
- Repeat InfraDAO benchmarking after material changes
BuildersDAO can be available to support the triage process and to scope remediation work once Livepeer has reviewed the report.
Grant Completion
This completes the single audit milestone under the approved $6,500 USD-equivalent Direct Grant, including the audit, community engagement, reporting, and this completion post.
A massive thank you from the BuildersDAO team to the Livepeer contributors who joined the community session or supplied technical context, and to InfraDAO and Ellipfra for providing the indexing and production-query data used in the review.