UNCX: the team who runs its own SQD Portal

What is UNCX?

UNCX (formerly UniCrypt) has been live since June 2020. It is a one-stop DeFi protocol that makes launching a project simple and as safe as possible for the people investing in it, with token and liquidity locks, token launches and reward programs.

It is deployed on 15 networks, from Ethereum, BNB Chain and Solana to newer chains like Robinhood Chain, HyperEVM, Arc, Ink, Monad and Krown.

Every position a UNCX user sees in the app comes from UNCX’s own indexers, so the data layer underneath has to be right.

Before: four data stacks, one reindex problem

UNCX started indexing in 2021 with its own scripts. The data was accurate, but it leaned hard on RPC calls, and some of it was only fetched live when a user connected to the frontend.

In 2023 and 2024 the team moved to The Graph on its Pro plan, since discontinued. It cost a lot, and the public data it exposed barely got used by UNCX’s community. In late 2024 UNCX built its own public API and moved its subgraphs to Goldsky to bring the bill down.

Cheaper hosting left the real problem in place. Goldsky still ran subgraphs, and subgraphs carry The Graph’s ceiling wherever they are hosted. Every indexer update meant reindexing from scratch.

The move: Squid SDK, then its own Portal

In mid 2025 UNCX ran a bake-off. Goldsky Pipelines, QuickNode Streams, The Graph Substreams and Envio went up against SQD, and SQD was the only one that met every requirement on UNCX’s list.

Self-hosting decided it. A hosted indexer puts your data on someone else’s servers, on someone else’s terms.

UNCX moved its indexers to Portal one at a time to protect production, and had every one migrated in about a month.

The legacy contracts with no events stopped being a problem. UNCX’s indexers read them from transactions and traces, which SQD serves alongside logs. The longest sync, the Uniswap V2 Locker, finishes in a few hours on some chains and takes about a week on BNB Chain.

Its own Portal, live in under a week

With every indexer on Portal, UNCX chose to run the Portal itself instead of using SQD’s shared endpoints. The main reason was predictable cost.

UNCX funded its Portal itself. It bought SQD on the open market and locked 1,000,000 SQD on the SQD Network, which is what gives a Portal its query capacity. That is the minimum the self-hosting docs set for a Portal. The tokens stay locked while the Portal runs, and more SQD means more capacity.

The first query took about a day of work. Building a repeatable setup in Ansible, testing teardown and rebuild, and getting the firewall rules right took a few more days. The whole thing was done in under a week.

The stack runs on three servers, one each for the Portal, Hotblocks and RPC services. Hosting them costs UNCX under €100 a month on OVH. That figure depends on the provider: Romain estimates the same vCPU and RAM would cost around $1,000 a month on AWS. Over the last seven days the Portal averaged around 15% CPU.

UNCX also splits its indexers by data type where it can: one processor reads logs, another reads traces, and a processor takes both only when a query needs both. Smaller queries return faster from the Portal, and each indexer ingests more blocks per second.

Not every network runs in real time. Following a chain’s head puts a heavy load on the RPC, so UNCX keeps 6 networks in real time: Ethereum, BNB Chain, Base, Robinhood Chain, Arc and Krown. The other 9 are archive-only, and UNCX accepts some delay on them. Of the real-time networks, Robinhood Chain and Arc cost the most to follow. Real-time data is where most of the running cost goes: UNCX estimates its RPC spend for the Portal at around $1,000 a month, for the calls that keep Hotblocks at the chain head. The RPC plan also serves other uses, so this is an approximate share.

A network SQD does not support, on the same Portal

Krown has no archive on the SQD Network. UNCX runs it through its own Portal anyway, as a real-time-only dataset. Blocks come from a Krown RPC endpoint into Hotblocks, and UNCX’s indexers read Krown from the same Portal as the other 14 networks.

What changed

In their words