How POAP scaled from hackathon project to Web3 phenomenon

In 2018, Patricio Worthalter started POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol) with a simple vision: use blockchain technology to create digital collectibles that mark life’s special moments. Celebrating everything from small online meetups to massive conferences, POAP turned these events into collectible tokens of memory.

Where it all began – the POAP team at ETHDenver in February 2019.

The idea struck a chord. POAP quickly became a cornerstone of Web3, evolving from a hackathon project at ETHDenver 2019 to cultural phenomenon. The ecosystem powers over 7 million badges across 40,000+ events held by a diverse customer base including Google, Ethereum Foundation, Goldman Sachs, Coinbase, Adidas, American Express, MetaMask, Porsche, Ernst & Young and Ubisoft.

But with more success came more problems. As POAP’s popularity exploded, so did the strain on its data infrastructure. Each item wasn’t just representing a memory; it represented data. Lots of it. And the cracks in their infrastructure began to show.

Proof of attendance, proof of struggle

By early 2022, POAP’s growth was outpacing its legacy data infrastructure. Patricio’s team found themselves firefighting daily, trying to juggle a growing user base while grappling a data stack on the verge of collapse. The setup was a patchwork of disparate tools stitched together, each maintained by different individuals, and it was buckling under the weight of surging demand.

• Slow, inconsistent query speeds were frustrating their team and users
• Poor scalability made it clear they weren’t ready for the surging traffic
• Fragile architecture relied on interdependent systems and was risky

We were leading the charge in a brand new category. That meant solving problems no one else had even encountered yet. Throwing more engineering talent at the issue bought us time, but it wasn’t sustainable. — Patricio Worthalter, Founder @ POAP

It was no longer about keeping up with demand. It was about how much longer their infrastructure could hold up before reaching a breaking point.

POAP’s new mission: overhaul their data infrastructure before everything explodes.

Searching for a lifeline

In March 2022, POAP was once again nearing capacity limits in their infrastructure and started searching for a better solution. Goldsky wasn’t an obvious choice. At the time, Gnosis Chain (the network POAP operates on) wasn’t even supported 👀 so when POAP reached out, they weren’t sure what to expect. But they had a hunch this could be the partnership they needed.

Goldsky didn’t just give us a pitch — they took the time to understand what we needed and worked with us to build it.

Within hours, Gnosis Chain was officially supported. It was a signal to the team that they’d found a partner willing to move fast and solve real problems together.

“They proposed what at the time was a new model of data infrastructure outsourcing. A hands-on service not just limited to infrastructure and data streams but also helping with query optimization and best practices in data handling.”

Supercharging queries for millions

At the heart of POAP’s challenge was query performance.

Their reliance on their current subgraph provider was causing frustrating delays, and user experience was suffering. “That was not really a fun ride,” Agustin Lavarello, their Technical Lead, nervously told us with a chuckle.

We stepped in with a custom solution: hosting POAP’s subgraph and leveraging Goldsky Mirror to transfer the data into a high-performance database. With Hasura layered on top, this system enabled faster, more reliable queries.

To benchmark Goldsky’s performance against their previous solution, POAP ran several tests executing 100 parallel queries, measuring the time it took to fetch token data. The test included a range of both small to high-volume users with thousands of tokens, ensuring coverage across real-world use cases.

The benchmark results showed that while the previous solution’s latency fluctuated significantly, especially under larger queries and higher load, Goldsky maintained stable, low-latency performance even as volume increased.

But the real test was how Goldsky would perform when fully integrated. The difference in performance was immediate. Patricio lit up: “It was like night and day. We weren’t trying to keep up with demand anymore. We were ahead of it.”

• Speed: Near-instant response times with p90 query latencies plummeting to <100ms, even for their biggest collections.
• Scalability: Peaks of 50 requests per second and 22.8M monthly requests handled with ease.
• Unstoppable uptime: 99.99%+ uptime since implementation, ending the era of unpredictable outages.

In Patricio’s very kind words:

Establishing a relationship with Goldsky has been a pivotal milestone in the history of POAP's tech stack. Before Goldsky we had to run our own indexing infrastructure, needing expert talent in-house, and finding new glitches and problems every week. The performance gains and overall satisfaction of making Goldsky our main data provider have exceeded our expectations.

Scaling for tomorrow without breaking today

Andrew meeting Agustin from POAP for some Argentine snacks, because the best partnerships happen over food

What started as a search for better infrastructure, and maybe a few snacks along the way, became less of an external vendor relationship and more like an extension of their team.

Patricio told us, “One of the main advantages of working with your team is being able to relax knowing that there’s a squad of data experts readily available to work with us solving any problem that can show up.” Music to our ears 🥹 that’s the kind of trust we love to build.

With blockchain adoption growing, data volumes exploding, and a packed 2025 roadmap, POAP’s team isn’t slowing down, and we’ll be right there with them.

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