Redefining the Data Layer: A Deep Dive into SQD’s Portal Upgrade

There are many narratives that have dominated crypto in 2025, from RWAs to privacy and from agents to stablecoins. But overarching all of these sectors and stories was a grander narrative – data. Because if there’s one thing that such incongruous verticals as RWAs and AI agents share in common, aside from their blockchain architecture, it’s an unceasing demand for data.

These sectors need all of the data, all of the time, from all of the places. Off-chain sources; onchain sources; centralized and decentralized systems. This ever-escalating demand for data has placed heightened demands on the Web3 infra providers that supply it. As a result, one of the leading blockchain data layers – SQD – has gone back to the drawing board and engineered an entirely new system for supplying Web3 data. Its name is Portal, and it lies at the heart of SQD’s forthcoming network upgrade.

Here’s everything you need to know about Portal and why it represents such a radical change in the way that Web3 data is delivered.

Blockchains and Bottlenecks

The traditional model for accessing indexed blockchain data involves an application sending a query and then waiting for a response; it asks and the data layer answers. This is fine for simple stuff – say, checking the price of BTC or inspecting a wallet balance – but it’s less suited to AI agents and perps platforms, to name but two examples, which consume data like it was an all-you-can-eat buffet.

In such scenarios, there’s latency, there’s lag, and there’s also the cost to consider – cos all those terabytes of data don’t come cheap. Moreover, because different data providers support different chains, protocols, and oracles, builders are often required to integrate multiple RPCs or indexes, each with its own costs and complexity. It’s a lot of plates to juggle simply to be able to pipe reliable data into a decentralized application.

Which is why the SQD team has gone away and done a lot of thinking about the problem. And now it’s returned with what it believes to be the optimal solution in the form of Portal, a scalable framework that transforms data into a streamable asset that works like WiFi – always there and always connected.

A Portal From Hell to Data Heaven

If you’re a DeFi user, you probably don’t think about where the data informing your trading comes from any more than you think about where the liquidity originates. Like the air that we breathe, it’s something we take for granted until its quality drops, at which point we become concerned. In other words, the only time we’re likely to think about blockchain data is when it’s suboptimal – a price quote is inaccurate or an oracle lags.

But for developers of the DeFi dapps you use on the daily, this is the stuff that keeps them up at night. Ensuring a constant and accurate supply of data is one of the toughest and most stressful challenges Web3 teams face. Most of the time, everything works smoothly. But occasionally – an RPC goes down or an oracle glitches – things break. It doesn’t matter how decentralized and downright novel they are: at the end of the day, a Web3 application is only as good as its data.

Portal from SQD is an ambitious attempt at engineering a solution to ensure that Web3 applications – both centralized and decentralized – work more reliably, more of the time, for the benefit of users and developers alike. To achieve this, SQD’s network upgrade introduces two major new features that are radically different to anything it has done before.

An Architectural Shift

Portal introduces two architectural changes that fundamentally restructure SQD’s data network. The most dramatic of these is the move from a discrete request model to a continuous data streaming one. Instead of waiting for a response to a query, developers receive a constant flow of updates. This eliminates round-trip latency and ensures that dapps don’t need to ask for information: it’s already piped in. It’s the equivalent of going from dial-up to broadband.

The other major change Portal incorporates is that the core computational engine responsible for data querying and processing has been rebuilt from scratch using Rust. In the process, SQD has further decentralized its system by moving away from the current centralized gateway, which its team believes will simultaneously enhance speed and operational resilience.

So far, so good: this all sounds encouraging. But while we’ve talked purely about Portal up until this point, it’s not the only change the SQD network upgrade will introduce. It’s time to talk about Pipes.

Introducing the Pipes SDK

While Portal provides the speed and reliability of the data flow, the accompanying Pipes SDK provides the crucial flexibility developers need to leverage that data. Its composable design allows engineers to build highly customized data pipelines. In effect, developers can select modular blockchain pieces and connect them – like literal pipes – to shape the raw data delivered by Portal.

As the SQD team explains, Pipes allows builders to “transform data, aggregate it, store it in any database, and plug it into any part of your system. Nothing forces you into a specific structure or pattern. Pipes SDK gives developers freedom to build the way they want.” This means devs can embed data into diverse environments and build pipelines that align precisely with their unique application logic, rather than being forced into a standardized data schema.

This modular approach aligns with one of the industry’s greatest ongoing challenges – interoperability. That is, making it easier for applications to be simultaneously deployed across multiple chains. That way, users can deposit assets on one network and utilize them on another; or onboard on the blockchain where their assets exist, rather than the network that’s been forced upon them.

A Lot to Unpack

There’s a lot to unpack with SQD’s imminent network upgrade, the most radical in the data layer’s history, and we haven’t even covered it all. But at the very least, we’ve explored two of the most pivotal new features in the form of Portal and Pipes and elaborated upon why they’re so different to anything that’s gone before.

If Portal delivers on its goals – lower latency, greater accuracy, improved composability, coupled with a cleaner developer experience – it will give builders a reliable foundation for engineering the next generation of Web3 systems. And for a space now defined by real-time logic and multi-chain coordination, that’s not just desirable – it’s essential.

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