Rodrigo Coelho, CEO of Edge & Node – Interview Series

Rodrigo Coelho is a technology executive, entrepreneur, and early Web3 innovator with more than 20 years of experience in engineering and decentralized infrastructure. In 2025, he became CEO of Edge & Node, the team behind The Graph, after previously serving as the company’s first hire and helping build its early architecture and ecosystem. Before joining The Graph, Rodrigo co-founded an application development firm during the early days of the web and later launched and exited two technology startups. With a background in Industrial Engineering, he focuses on advancing decentralized technologies, open innovation, and developer ecosystems from his base in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Under Rodrigo’s leadership, Edge & Node continues to expand the infrastructure powering decentralized applications and AI-driven data access across Web3. The company has played a central role in growing The Graph into one of the leading indexing and query protocols for blockchain data, supporting developers building across multiple ecosystems. Rodrigo remains focused on scaling the network’s capabilities, strengthening partnerships, and helping accelerate adoption of decentralized internet infrastructure.

You were one of the earliest team members helping scale The Graph into what many now call the “Google of blockchains,” and have since stepped into the CEO role at Edge & Node. How has your journey from operations lead to CEO shaped your vision for the next phase of decentralized infrastructure?

I joined The Graph as the first employee in 2018. I’ve founded 3 other businesses, and have run 4 in my career. Whether you’re in operations or as the CEO, I like to have a relentless focus on the ONE THING. What is the ONE THING this week that is going to move the needle the most? Do we need to set up some software? Do we need to deal with a client issue? What is blocking the code shipping? This never changes because there is always another thing!

So as we proceeded through the years we started to see that regulated institutions were moving onchain. That traditional finance was going to use blockchain rails for everything in the future. This is a megatrend that isn’t stopping anytime soon, and is accelerating this year. As an R&D company, we saw this trend coming and spent a couple of years rebuilding from first principles what we’d already built on The Graph to meet the needs of this new reality. Fortunately, we bet right and the world has come to us and to our solution with Amp. We similarly bet early on agentic commerce being a megatrend, and were also proven right with our other product Ampersend putting the necessary guardrails in place for humans to have observability and control over agentic finance.

As we continue to focus on the main things each week – something new may emerge that will steer our vision for what comes next. We will see. But one thing I know for sure is that we will be agile and ready for whatever happens.

For readers less familiar, how would you explain the role of indexing protocols like The Graph in enabling the decentralized web, and why they are foundational to web3?

I like to use the analogy that blockchains are like writing into a big book. Each page is a block, and when that page is full, you turn the page and you can never look back. Now imagine that the book is closed. You can’t read what’s in there! That’s where The Graph comes in. We are the software you use to read the data that’s in that book. We organize it and make sense of it because it’s all jumbled and present it to you in a spreadsheet type of format. You can then build web and mobile applications that use this data so much quicker and easier than having to reinvent the wheel each time. That is the huge advancement that The Graph brought to web3 in 2018, and for those that remember “DeFi Summer” of 2021, that was The Graph’s data behind the scenes for all of it.

The Graph has become a critical data layer powering thousands of decentralized applications by indexing blockchain data and making it queryable through APIs. How do you see this data layer evolving as AI agents and autonomous systems increasingly interact with blockchain networks?

Agents don’t browse the web the way humans do. They execute sequences of actions based on what they can observe and verify. For agents working with financial systems or onchain assets, data quality becomes critical very fast. An agent making an autonomous decision about a transaction needs to know that the data it’s reading is accurate, timely, and verifiable.

The Graph, and now Amp, handle that indexing layer. The next question is trust. How does a human, or another system, verify that an agent acted on correct information and didn’t act on unverified or fabricated data? That’s the problem Ampersend is built to address: policies, audit trails, spending limits, observability across agent sessions. The data layer and the control layer have to evolve together. One without the other doesn’t hold up in a regulated environment.

Edge & Node emerged from the core team behind The Graph but has since expanded its scope. How do you define the company’s role today within the broader web3 ecosystem?

Edge & Node built The Graph. That’s where the credibility starts. The team that built the indexing standard now serving 100+ chains is the same team building what comes next.

Today that means two main products. Amp is a blockchain data platform for enterprises and regulated institutions. It takes onchain data and turns it into structured, verifiable, real-time datasets that plug into existing infrastructure like Snowflake or BigQuery. Ampersend is the control layer for the agent economy. As AI agents start operating with financial autonomy, governance becomes non-negotiable: policies, audit trails, and human-in-the-loop controls.

The common thread is infrastructure at the convergence of AI and onchain systems.It’s the natural extension of what we’ve been building since 2018.

One of the longstanding challenges in web3 has been balancing decentralization with performance and developer experience. Where do you think the industry still falls short, and what breakthroughs are needed to close that gap?

Developer experience has been the weak link for most of the last eight years. The tooling has been fragmented, documentation inconsistent, and too often the tooling existed without clear problems to solve.

The other gap that doesn’t get enough attention is compliance. Most infrastructure wasn’t built with regulatory requirements in mind. That’s becoming a real problem as institutional capital tries to interact with onchain systems. You can have the most elegant decentralized architecture, and it still fails if a regulated institution can’t demonstrate data lineage or audit readiness. That’s a gap the industry is just starting to seriously address, and this is why we built Amp.

As decentralized infrastructure matures, do you see it competing directly with traditional cloud providers, or coexisting as a complementary layer?

Complementary, but not in the way people usually mean that.

AWS and Google Cloud are exceptional at general-purpose compute, storage, and data warehousing. They were not designed for blockchains. Snowflake wasn’t built for chain reorganizations. BigQuery wasn’t designed to track the event logs of smart contracts across 100 chains simultaneously. That’s not a criticism. It’s a product scope decision made in a world where blockchains barely existed.

What’s happening now is that enterprises are building hybrid stacks. Existing cloud and data warehouse investments stay. What gets added is a layer that handles the blockchain-specific data problems: real-time ingestion, reorg handling, verifiable extraction, multi-chain normalization. Amp is built exactly for that integration point. It plugs in rather than trying to replace existing systems.

There is growing interest in decentralized physical infrastructure networks, where blockchain coordinates real-world resources like compute, storage, and connectivity. How do you see Edge & Node and The Graph fitting into this emerging category?

DePIN networks coordinate real-world infrastructure onchain. Compute, storage, wireless. The Graph has done this from day one, running a decentralized network of indexers who get paid in GRT to serve data queries.

What these networks actually need to work is a data layer. Operators need to know what’s happening across the network in real time. Who’s earning what, what’s being consumed, where the bottlenecks are. That data has to be structured and verifiable. That’s what Amp does.

The real world is messier than DeFi. More moving parts, more edge cases. Getting the data right is the hard part. We’ve been doing that for eight years.

With thousands of developers building on top of The Graph, what patterns are you seeing in terms of real-world adoption? Are there specific sectors or use cases that are gaining the most traction?

DeFi was the proving ground. The projects that survived multiple cycles are now mature applications with real user volumes. Gaming is picking up fast. Real-world assets are the frontier.

The core usage we were built for is stablecoins and agents. Both need the same thing: blockchain data that’s real-time, verifiable, and auditable. Stablecoin infrastructure needs to know exactly what’s happening onchain at all times. Agents need data they can trust to act on. Amp is built for both.

The metric I watch isn’t where developers are building. It’s what survives a bear market. The usage that holds through a downturn is the usage that matters. Stablecoins and agentic systems aren’t speculative. They’re the next layer of financial infrastructure. That’s where we’re focused.

Looking ahead, what does a fully realized decentralized web actually look like from a user perspective, and what milestones still need to be reached to get there?

For users, the test is simple. If you have to know it’s decentralized for it to feel different, it hasn’t worked yet. The goal is that the underlying architecture enables properties users care about, ownership of their data, portability, and censorship resistance, without requiring them to understand how it works.

The milestones that need to be reached first are practical. Latency has to be competitive with centralized alternatives. Developer tooling has to be good enough that the best builders choose decentralized infrastructure because it solves their problems, not because of ideology. Regulatory clarity has to exist in enough jurisdictions for institutions to participate. The GENIUS Act is one data point. January 2027 is the deadline regulated institutions are tracking for stablecoin compliance. Compliance rails have to be in place before institutional capital flows in any volume.

The infrastructure is invisible. What you notice is what you can do.

Given your background building companies from early-stage through scale, what advice would you give to founders building infrastructure in web3 today, particularly in a market that is still maturing?

Infrastructure is a long game. The teams still here after eight years didn’t survive by chasing cycles. They stayed focused on the actual technical problem and didn’t confuse token price with product-market fit.

The advice I give founders right now: don’t build for today’s market. Find the nails, then build the hammer. The problems that matter in five years are already visible. Stablecoins need verifiable, real-time data infrastructure. Agents need governance rails, spending controls, audit trails. That’s where Amp and ampersend come from. We didn’t build them for what was needed at the time. We had a vision of what was needed in the future.

Compliance isn’t a feature you add later. It’s an architectural decision you make at the foundation. The agentic economy and regulated finance are converging. The founders who architect for that now will be the ones who matter when it arrives.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Edge & Node or The Graph.