Five Years, One Squid, and One Hell of a Raid

2020: The Pizza That Started It All

I still remember the beginning surprisingly clearly, probably because there was absolutely nothing spectacular about it at the time.

The name Subsquid did not exist yet. There was no company, no network, no token, no grand strategy deck forecasting where we would be five years later.

I was working as an analyst for a fund in Berlin, and shortly before that I had been speaking with Dima about an indexing framework he was building. He had recently won a hackathon with it, and there was clearly something interesting there, although neither of us could really know where it might lead.

Then, one evening, I met someone I knew from earlier endeavors at a local pizzeria in Berlin. He would later become one of the most important early enablers and backers of Subsquid.

Somewhere during that conversation, I told him about Dima, the indexing framework and the idea behind it. His reaction was simple: “I want to be part of this. How can I support?”

Looking back, it is almost absurd how much can change because of one conversation.

Not long afterwards, I handed in my resignation and went all-in.

There was no carefully constructed master plan behind that decision. There was simply the feeling that something interesting was happening and that, if we wanted to see where it could lead, we had to commit properly.

Dima and I started building, discussing ideas and, at some point, trying to figure out what on earth we should call this thing.

Eventually, we landed on “Subsquid.” At the time, it was just a name. Over the following years, that strange word became something much larger. It became a brand, a company, a workplace and a community. It became a place where people collaborated and experimented, where friendships were formed and where countless hours were spent trying to solve difficult problems.

It is funny to think that an entire chapter of my life can ultimately be traced back to a conversation over pizza.

2021: The Polkadot Era

By early 2021, things started becoming more real. One of my favorite memories from that period is a road trip to Switzerland with a friend who would later support us on the marketing side. We were heading to Zug to establish Subsquid Labs, still very much in that early-stage startup mode where everything feels improvised and strangely exciting at the same time.

Somewhere close to the border, we were pulled over by the police for a routine check. Nothing dramatic happened, but it somehow felt perfectly appropriate. Classic startup road-trip vibes.

Around the same time, Subsquid started gaining serious traction in the Polkadot ecosystem. Parachains were one of the hottest topics in crypto, the ecosystem was expanding rapidly and our indexing framework was in the right place at the right time. Adoption picked up quickly, and over time we became the go-to indexing solution in that space.

For a young company, that was a special period. We had spent so much effort simply trying to build something useful, and suddenly there were developers using it, projects depending on it and people across the ecosystem paying attention.

With that came a different kind of pressure. Once people start relying on what you build, expectations change and the stakes become more real.

VCs reached out. Accelerators reached out. Foundations and leading protocol founders wanted to support us. Eventually, that momentum led to our Seed Round.

For a while, everything moved quickly. But crypto has a way of reminding you that no market lasts forever. The Polkadot hype eventually cooled, and by 2022 it became clear that if Subsquid wanted to become something larger than a successful product inside one ecosystem, we had to expand.

So we added EVM support, and the next chapter began.

2022–2023: Building Through the Grind

The following years were much less glamorous. We integrated EVM, gained new users, continued building the network and raised additional capital from top-tier VCs. On paper, many of those things looked like steady progress. But anyone who has built a company knows that the story visible from the outside is rarely the full story.

The market became increasingly crowded. Competition intensified. Many startups disappeared. In Web3, there was often plenty of enthusiasm for using infrastructure, but much less enthusiasm for actually paying for it. We were learning that technical adoption, commercial adoption and sustainable business models are three very different things.

Those years forced us to confront some of the hardest problems we had faced since starting the company. They also taught us something I still think about today: money cannot solve everything.

Funding can give you time, people, resources and optionality, but there are moments in a company's life when none of those things are enough. Certain challenges can only be solved through teamwork, resilience, patience and the willingness to keep working when the obvious solutions have already failed.

That period was a true grind.

And perhaps this is where my slightly unhealthy relationship with World of Warcraft finally became professionally useful.

I have played WoW on and off for more than a decade, and anyone who has spent enough time in that world understands the mentality. You can prepare properly, assemble the right group, understand the mechanics and still wipe repeatedly. Sometimes there is no shortcut. You go again, learn something, adjust and try once more.

Building Subsquid often felt exactly like that. There were periods when things worked well and others when we had to rethink what we were doing. Sometimes the path ahead was clear; sometimes we had to find it as we went. But the team kept going. That persistence is one of the things I am most proud of when I look back at those years.

And somewhere during that period, another important development began. We started having our first conversations with enterprises such as Google. At the time, those conversations were simply opportunities we took seriously. Years later, some of them became an important part of where Subsquid is today.

2024: CoinList, TGE and a Moment of Glory

By 2024, we were approaching the testnet phase of the SQD Network. The broader market was not particularly exciting at the time. Web3 sentiment was fairly dry, attention had moved elsewhere and the general atmosphere could probably best be described as “meh.”

Against that backdrop, we launched our CoinList sale. What followed was one of those moments where years of work suddenly became very visible. The sale filled at extraordinary speed, with commitments and deposits from the community exceeding the available allocation by multiple times. X went wild, our website saw millions of impressions and, for a short period of time, Subsquid was suddenly the cool kid on the block.

I remember how good that felt, not simply because of the attention, but because the team deserved that moment. People had spent years solving difficult and often unglamorous problems, working through difficult markets and continuing to push forward when very few people were watching. For once, the attention matched the effort that had gone into getting there.

Later that year came the token launch, together with all the highs and lows that naturally accompany an experience like that. Anyone who was involved knows there are enough stories from that chapter to fill another letter, so I will leave most of them where they belong.

I do, however, vividly remember travelling with a colleague to Hong Kong and other places, sometimes essentially flying in and out for a single day, just to meet leading people from exchanges and try to secure listings. It was exhausting, and at times our schedules became completely ridiculous, but that was what the company required from us in that period.

At the same time, the network itself started growing quickly. During the planning stages, I remember discussions about whether we might be able to bootstrap perhaps 100 or 200 nodes. That would already have been a strong start. The actual demand turned out to be significantly higher, and watching the network take shape was another moment the team could be proud of.

There is something very satisfying about seeing something move from whiteboards, documents and assumptions into a system that people actually choose to participate in.

2025: The AI Era and Rezolve

Then came 2025, and once again the technological landscape shifted. The rise of ChatGPT and other large language models changed the conversation across the technology industry. AI was developing at remarkable speed, and crypto projects increasingly began repositioning themselves around the opportunities emerging from it. We did the same. Subsquid evolved into SQD.ai.

In hindsight, adapting (but never pivoting) had become one of the recurring themes of our journey. We began in Polkadot, expanded into EVM, built the network, worked through changing market cycles and repeatedly adjusted our positioning as the industry evolved around us. The move toward AI was another chapter in that story.

Our repositioning, together with the development of the SQD Network, eventually led to M&A conversations. Those conversations resulted in Rezolve AI acquiring Subsquid Labs. That brought us into an environment very different from the one we had spent the previous years operating in.

Whether the acquisition ultimately becomes a major strategic catalyst for Subsquid is something only time can answer. What I can say is that moving from a startup environment into a corporate one taught us a lot in a short period of time. Some experiences are difficult to understand from the outside. You have to live through them.

2026: The Enterprise Era

And that brings us to where Subsquid stands today. Portals have rolled out. SQD 360 is taking shape. Subsquid Labs is increasingly transforming into an enterprise service company.

What makes this stage particularly meaningful for me is that many of the relationships now turning into real business did not begin yesterday. Some of them were built patiently over years. Conversations that once felt exploratory are now becoming paying enterprise relationships at a scale that would have felt difficult to picture when we first started them.

There is something deeply satisfying about that. Startups tend to celebrate immediate wins, but many of the most important outcomes take time. A relationship started years ago can suddenly become relevant. A product built for one problem can become useful in another context. Work that once felt like preparation can eventually become the foundation for something concrete.

That is why I want to include not only the people who are part of Subsquid today, but also everyone who contributed along the way and has since moved on. Companies are cumulative. People leave fingerprints behind. And there are a lot of fingerprints on Subsquid.

The industry is maturing, enterprise demand is becoming more tangible, and Subsquid is in a strong position to continue building from here.

Leaving Something That Became Home

And now I arrive at the part I have probably avoided thinking about for as long as possible.

Subsquid has been my home for more than half a decade. When you build a company from its earliest days, it becomes difficult to separate the company from your own life. The memories merge together: the late-night calls, the launches, the trips, the difficult conversations, the small victories nobody outside the company ever hears about, the mistakes, the celebrations, the people who arrive and the people who eventually leave.

At some point, what started as a project becomes something closer to a living thing. You care about it deeply. You protect it, worry about it, fight for it and celebrate when things go well.

And eventually, if the company develops in the right direction, it reaches a point where it no longer depends on the same people who were there at the beginning. That is where Subsquid feels like it is today.

The “baby” has left the nest. Or, to translate this into the language everybody who knows me probably expected eventually: the guild no longer needs the same raid leaders it started with.

There is something bittersweet about that realization, but it is also something to be proud of. A founder should probably hope to reach the point where the company they helped create is strong enough to continue without them. Subsquid today is equipped with exceptional people, and I have no doubt that they can continue the journey successfully.

My hope is simple: that ten years from now, this period will look like one chapter in a much longer Subsquid story.

Letting go is not comfortable. It takes courage, and I would be lying if I said the decision did not come with a mixture of emotions. There is sadness because something that shaped so much of my life is changing. There is pride in what we built and in the people who built it. There is excitement about what comes next. And above everything else, there is gratitude.

I will never turn my back on Subsquid. I may no longer be a Squid internally, but I will always be one in my heart. If the team ever needs me, they can count on my support.

Some guilds you leave.

Others stay with you.

This one will stay with me.

What Comes Next?

So what now?

I think I will return to something that has always been deeply embedded in my personality: exploring and going on adventures.

I want to think, experiment, experience new cultures and societies, probably including a few digital ones, and give myself the freedom to discover what captures my attention next.

There is something in the nature of an entrepreneur that makes standing still difficult. We are drawn to new things. We want to explore, iterate, test and understand.

For more than five years, Subsquid was the map I spent most of my time exploring.

Now, for me, there is fog of war again.

I do not know exactly what is hidden there, and I actually like that.

Five years ago, one of the most important journeys of my life began with a conversation over pizza. There was no perfect plan and no certainty that it would work.

There was simply an opportunity, curiosity and the willingness to go all-in.

Maybe the best journeys begin exactly like that.

To Dima, to every Squid past and present, and to the people who believed in us, backed us, worked with us and supported us through all the different eras of this company:

Thank you for the trust, the battles, the long nights, the victories, the wipes and for always being willing to queue for one more attempt.

It has been one hell of a raid.

And now, for me, it is time to discover the next world.

Lok'tar ogar!