The Graph creator Edge & Node taps new CEO Tegan Kline as growth becomes top priority

Edge & Node, one of the development teams behind The Graph protocol, has appointed co-founder Tegan Kline as the company’s newest chief executive.

Including an interim CEO, Kline will be the third person to occupy the top job at Edge & Node.

A Wall Street alum with stints at both Barclays and Bank of America, Kline previously served as Edge & Node’s chief business officer after joining the company in 2021. Before assuming an official role at the company, Kline had participated in its fundraising efforts. 

“I led the fundraising round and I was invited to be co-founder of Edge & Node along with the initial founders of The Graph,” Kline said, adding that she has helped raise a total of $77.5 million.

Edge & Node’s primary focus for The Graph

Up until now, Edge & Node’s primary focus has been making sure the technology buttressing the The Graph protocol is ready for "mass migration," said Kline.

“We’ve had an engineer at the helm from the very beginning and that was very important [initially],” she said, adding that the focus has shifted to migrating as many web3 applications as possible to The Graph infrastructure. “Right now what we need is someone with that business mind … and that’s what I’m good at doing.”

Edge & Node has labelled The Graph a “web3 protocol for organizing and accessing blockchain data.”

“The Graph is the only decentralized indexing and query protocol,” Kline explained. “What that means is The Graph is organizing data that’s on the blockchain. It’s super hard to get, it’s very cumbersome, super expensive, it’s really difficult to get data off the blockchain and to organize that data. The Graph does it in a decentralized way.”

The Graph ecosystem fund

To further clarify, Kline drew a comparison to a web2 giant. “Similar to how Google organizes data so we can easily access that data, that’s what The Graph is doing for over 90,000 developers in the web3 space.”

In early 2022, The Graph took part in the launch of an “ecosystem fund” worth $205 million — which while not constituting a direct investment into the protocol — created a pool of capital earmarked for projects built on the protocol, the company said.

Participants included Digital Currency Group, Multicoin Capital, Reciprocal Ventures and HashKey.