The problem Swagur solves

The Augur Protocol has an expansive list of smart contracts on which it is built, while all information is publicly available on the blockchain, interactions with it are not well documented. This poses a difficult challenge for anyone who wants to view some basic information about certain components like users, markets and universes. While the Augur UI platform built on top of Augur provides a way for the essential trading and disputing mechanisms, a lot of the information is obfuscated either intentionally or unintentionally. This poses a problem for sleuths who want to extract information about a particular user or market, since the only other option is to directly interact with smart contracts without documentation to guide them. Swagur aims to provide a simple interface to view certain information by interacting with a community subgraph built on top of The Graph and Augur Protocol. This enables ease of access to particular information about users and markets that would otherwise not be possible to display without interacting without the contracts themselves.

Challenges I ran into

The first problem was the fact I did not know how to write GraphQL but that is primarily what The Graph relies on, so learning that was a primary hurdle. The second challenge was that the official Augur subgraph did not have anything more than event entries which meant querying individual IDs was not possible, so we had to rely on a community subgraph from Protofire to get the details we wanted. Once I got the hang of GraphQL, spinning up test queries was quite intuitive - and the fact that it worked similarly to a REST API from a Web2 perspective meant that the entire process made sense. Working with the smart contracts was insanely difficult because of the lack of documentations surrounding them, this was also a problem with the subgraphs where some of the entries did not have attached documentation. Augur Protocol itself is an incredibly expansive set of smart contracts which meant navigating your way around it is quite difficult. However, it was a quite fresh experience for me and offered a new outlook into the kind of projects that can be built on top of Ethereum.