what's Ponder?

Ponder is an open-source framework for building fast, reliable, and maintainable backend software for blockchain applications, specializing in custom indexing for EVM smart contracts. It allows developers to define schemas, indexing functions for events/logs/transactions/traces/blocks, and automatically generates a type-safe GraphQL API for querying indexed data. Running in a Node.js environment, Ponder supports importing NPM packages, HTTP requests, and database connections, with built-in handling for chain reorgs, factory contracts, and multi-chain setups. Designed for web/mobile developers, Ponder provides a local dev server with hot reloading, end-to-end TypeScript type safety and autocomplete without codegen, and superior performance—syncing data up to 10-15x faster than The Graph subgraphs while using far less disk space and RPC calls. Deployment is one-click to any Node.js runtime or Docker with zero-downtime scaling and observability.