The Graph's Arbitration Team posted its decision on 11 November 2026 at 15:04 UTC. The decision settles an indexing dispute over self-curation, where an Indexer adds curation signal to Subgraphs it then indexes. The dispute is resolved as a Draw. The Indexer is not slashed, and the Arbitrators say self-curation will not be treated as slashable on its own. The Arbitrators consulted The Graph Council before deciding.
The dispute
A Fisherman filed dispute 0x9347e202… on 18 October 2026 against Indexer 0x0a015d9e…db07, which BitBasic lists as badcoffee.eth. The Fisherman cited GDR-15, an earlier case in which the Arbitrators had accepted that manipulating curation to steer honest Indexers was slashable. According to the filing:
- the Indexer was the curator on 744 of 1,000 sampled open allocations;
- it was the only Indexer on nearly all of them;
- it earned about 24 times the network median reward per allocated GRT.
The Arbitrators' view
The Arbitrators say self-curation is "a practice that we want to discourage". They also say it cannot be policed fairly, for three reasons:
- signal can come from any wallet, so it cannot be reliably attributed to an Indexer;
- a ban would push the practice into wallets nobody can link to the Indexer;
- a third party could copy an honest Indexer's activity from unlinked wallets and then dispute it.
The Arbitrators add that this ruling does not overturn GDR-15. That case was decided about four years ago, when the protocol ran on Ethereum mainnet and curation worked differently. The on-chain settlement transaction will be posted later.
Recommended changes
The Arbitrators put four recommendations to the Council. None of them is in force yet:
- Raise the curation tax from 1% to between 3% and 10%, so that rapidly moving signal stops paying. This would also cost developers who curate their own Subgraphs.
- Use the Subgraph Availability Oracle to deny rewards on Subgraphs that add no value.
- Consider raising the minimum curation amount from 1 wei GRT to 100 or 1,000 GRT, if abuse is detected.
- Amend the Arbitration Charter so that it guides the Arbitrators in cases it does not anticipate.
In the longer term, they point to indexing payments under GIP-0081, GIP-0087 and GIP-0088. GIP-0088 would fund indexing agreements with an initial 6 GRT per block, about 5% of issuance, which would make indexing depend less on curation signal.
What it means
- Indexers: self-curating is not slashable by itself, but the Arbitrators will keep watching curation activity. A higher curation tax or a higher minimum would change what curation costs.
- Curators and Subgraph developers: a curation tax of 3% to 10% would make signalling dearer for everyone, so watch for a formal proposal.
- Delegators: nothing changes for now.
