Meet Covalent, the backbone of blockchain data

Published in

Covalent

4 min readMar 26, 2021

What is covalent

Covalent is a technology company that solves data infrastructure problems that prevent the blockchain industry from growing and becoming widely adopted. Internally, Covalent implements various solutions to develop an index of blockchain data, standardize it, and make it externally available to developers in the industry through the Covalent API.

The vision of Covalent is to empower the pioneers of tomorrow by providing the richest and most robust data infrastructure for the entire blockchain ecosystem. And ultimately, bring data transparency and visibility to digital assets.

Covalent provides a unified API to all assets secured by a blockchain network. Developers get simple APIs that allow for quick integration in new or existing products. Currently, 25 billion rich transactions indexed including every transaction since genesis for 6 blockchains. 200k+ smart contracts are available with internal data structures for querying. 30k+ price feeds for fiat and crypto pairs, all with a 30second refresh rate.

Why is Covalent important

Blockchain data, like all data, is very useful and precious. However, blockchain data runs into a few problems. It is expensive to index the data since it requires running archive nodes and writing scripts to extract it. To make that happen elite engineers have to be hired. The data is not only hard to extract but also difficult to read. The data has to be structured so developers can easily use it. All these problems make indexing very time-consuming and existing tools are not scalable.

As described, Covalent solves this problem. With Covalent’s robust API, developers and their users can gain transparency and visibility of assets across all blockchain networks. Covalent structures the disordered blockchain data and analyses it by its proprietary technology to deliver institution-specific answers. Covalent helps businesses in accessing synthesized blockchain data to gain insights and accommodate decision-making processes. Covalent is a no-code solution, this means no complicated SQL queries, no subgraph development, and maintenance.

For a more in-depth read on why protocols need data indexing, check out this article: Why protocols need data indexing.

To check out a case study using Covalent check out this article: Case study of the data availability gap in DeFi using Covalent.

Which networks and projects does Covalent support

Covalent supports multiple top-tier blockchains as illustrated below.

Currently, over 100 top-of-the-line projects are building and succeeding with the Covalent API. A few are illustrated below.

Backing

Covalent recently closed a $2million strategic funding round to launch its decentralized data query network. This round was led by Hashed, with participation from Binance Labs, Coinbase Ventures, Delphi Ventures, and other ecosystem partners. The new funding will accelerate product timelines to launch a decentralized version of the market-leading Covalent API.

The previous $3.1 million funding round in the summer of 2020, with investments from Alameda Research, CoinGecko, 1kx, AU21, and more, lead to dramatic growth across all business metrics:

Traction — the growth of projects which are building and succeeding with the Covalent API has grown to over a hundred.
Team — the team has grown from 3 to over 25 passionate crypto veterans
Indexing support — The API has extended to support six other blockchains besides Ethereum, as mentioned before.