The Covalent Blog

By Ganesh on March 17, 2020

TLDR; Today we are excited to release an industry-defining notification engine for the Ethereum blockchain. In light of recent events that occurred with the Maker system, we leaned into our product roadmap to ship this urgent feature today rather than sometime later in the year. Our vision is to materially reduce the number of liquidations that happen to borrowers because nobody should lose funds due to bad or unavailable data.

By Pratik on March 2, 2020

TLDR; Today we want to address a topic in the crypto space that isn’t often discussed – building communities. Most Telegram communities are outright spammy, everyone has their Discord channels muted, and very few people really get Crypto Twitter. The channels to build your community are endless but identifying your true believers and where they live will make you stand out from the rest. We are happy to open-source our thinking around building communities with the goal that you can use this post as a guide to start building yours.

By Ganesh on February 23, 2020

TLDR; When investors evaluate the risks associated with Staking Yields, they are usually considering smart contract security risk, economic risk and perhaps regulatory/compliance risk. In this post, we make the case that there’s also an opportunity cost risk behind staking that an investor often overlooks. This is the risk of participating in a staking network as a validator as opposed to simply staying put on your initial cryptoassets. Our thesis is that this facet of risk will come under increased scrutiny as more Proof-of-Stake (PoS) networks come online.

By Ganesh on February 12, 2020

Covalent is going to Denver to participate in the largest Ethereum – and other blockchains – event of the year. Ganesh (Covalent’s co-founder) will be giving a talk on the DeFi data availability gap and will showcasing common DeFi use-cases that can lead to a nightmare when it comes to record-keeping.

We really love the Ethereum community, so feel free to message Ganesh (his DM’s are open.)

By Ganesh on February 9, 2020

TLDR; Staking is radical in the crypto world. It recreates parallels to traditional finance which is something mainstream investors understand. We make the case that though staking yields look approachable, they are still nuanced. An investor must think about token economics, security budgeting and tax efficiency when considering staking.

By Ganesh on February 5, 2020

TLDR; Today, we are happy to open-source a compilation of customer research on the DeFi userbase. We’ve invested 100’s of hours researching the most engaged DeFi users to understand their immediate and urgent needs. We are also sharing our process of whittling down these insights into a list of priority action items. Part 1 of this post includes research on Set protocol and Gnosis wallets.

By Ganesh on February 2, 2020

TLDR; Founders want to build big expansive products. In my opinion, starting to build a big product with lots of use-cases is the wrong approach and is very difficult to pull off. It’s better to start planning your roadmap as a set of narrow overlapping use-cases with a tight narrative. We present a repeatable process to apply to your product roadmap to achieve product-market fit and wide adoption.

By Ganesh on January 26, 2020

TLDR; All blockchain data on Ethereum is public, yet getting data off them is hard. It’s messy, disorganized and time-consuming even for an engineer. If you’re non-technical – forget about it. 😡 In this post, we discuss a common use-case of MakerDAO with leveraged lending that can lead to a nightmarish situation when it comes to record-keeping. We have a solution – Covalent – to this specific problem and broadly to what we call the DeFi data availability gap.

By Ganesh on January 22, 2020

TLDR; Towards the end of 2019, the Maker project released the next major update of their system – the Multi-Collateral DAI – usually abbreviated as MCD. An overlooked component of their system is the DAI Savings Rate (DSR) – a “risk-free” way of earning interest on your DAI stablecoin holdings. In this post, we’ll take a look at what the DSR is, how it works and how to keep track of your interest income.

By Ganesh on January 17, 2020

TLDR; For better or worse, the crypto industry has fixated on Total Value Locked (TVL) in DeFi protocols as the unit of measure to benchmark the traction / adoption of this nascent industry. In this post, we make the case that it’s neither and the metric tracks factors irrelevant to traction/adoption. The entirety of this metric depends on the ETH-USD market.

By Ganesh on January 7, 2020

The year 2019 marks our second year of operations at Covalent. Here’s a letter I shared with our stakeholders – staff, investors, partners and customers on our progress in 2019 and where we see the growth opportunities in 2020.

By Ganesh on November 20, 2019

Getting accurate crypto data is HARD and continues to be an adoption blocker. In this episode, we look at a surprising discrepancy of interest rates for a popular lending platform Nuo Networks.

By Ganesh on November 7, 2019

Ganesh (Covalent’s co-founder) had the opportunity to speak to a group of DeFi enthusiasts last week in Toronto on sustainable business models in the blockchain chain. Video recording LIVE from the #DeFi Toronto meetup! https://t.co/nns5A7DIEq — Ganesh Swami (@gane5h) November 8, 2019

By Ganesh on November 4, 2019

How does $400,000 of profit per month from #DeFi sound to you? Skeptical? 🤔

That’s what dYdX Protocol liquidators made in September 2019 by liquidating undercollateralized loans.

By Ganesh on October 28, 2019

TLDR; We’re excited to launch DeFi behind the scenes – an exploratory look at business models and traction behind various decentralized finance applications on the blockchain. Two widely held beliefs about Ethereum DApps: 1) Nobody uses them for anything useful besides speculation and 2) There are no business models and nobody is making money. Our vision behind this series is to use data to provide a credible narrative behind the dollars and users that make these projects stick. We are experimenting with a video format to tell this story – short 5 to 10 minutes that builds a case.

We kickoff the first episode with InstaDApp - an intuitive frontend for MakerDAO, Compound, Uniswap and other decentralized finance applicaitons.

By Ganesh on September 25, 2019

Ganesh (Covalent’s co-founder) had the opportunity to speak to a group of product managers last week in San Francisco on Automated Market Making and Uniswap. Most people only know how to use Uniswap as a decentralized exchange. It was interesting to show people how Uniswap works for them as a liquidity provider. To spice things up, we also distributed DAI to all the attendees, so everyone had a chance to participate as an LP.

By Ganesh on August 29, 2019

TLDR; Stablecoins have been all the rage in 2019 – arguably one of the few products on the blockchain that have found product-market fit. There are over 30 stablecoins live on Ethereum. But picking one stablecoin over another can be challenging. We need a deeper understanding of stablecoins to analyze investment returns, build portfolios and reduce risk. We explore the concept of velocities – an economic signal to determine the activity of an economy. Higher velocities correspond to more activity and vice-versa.

By Ganesh on July 23, 2019

TLDR; We’re launching defistats.io – an independent source for visually exploring the emerging “decentralized finance” use-case on the Ethereum blockchain. We’re launching with 10x analytics for the 🦄 Uniswap exchange protocol featuring 1) the 🔥 trade volumes and liquidity reserves for the ~600 exchanges that make up Uniswap, 2) the individual liquidity providers who contribute including the 💰 returns on their positions and 3) on-chain 💹 prices for the ETH-token pairs from the exchanges on the blockchain.

We will soon expand to other use-cases like lending, derivatives, prediction markets, insurance, etc. There’s a lot more to come – we are only beginning our journey of making blockchain data transparent and accessible. Uniswap’s available today!

By Ganesh on April 25, 2019

TLDR; We’ve written a deep-dive on 🦄 UniSwap – a protocol for automated ERC20 token exchanges on Ethereum – using data from Covalent’s API. Our analysis is on 1) the markets that make up UniSwap 2) the liquidity providers who stake their assets in exchange for a cut and 3) the actual users who want to exchange their digital assets. We’ve also open-sourced the real-time data feeds behind the analysis if you want to follow along. 😍

Introduced in the fall of 2018, UniSwap is censorship resistant, has no single point of failure and completely eliminates rent-seeking intermediaries. Unlike other for-profit centralized exchanges, UniSwap has no native token, has no listing fees and the entire source code for all smart contracts is open-source and public.

UniSwap creates a new exchange contract for each ETH-ERC20 trading pair. These contracts internally keep a reserve of both ETH as well as the specific ERC20 token. UniSwap is uniquely differentiated from other decentralized exchanges because it maintains no order book. UniSwap’s exchange contracts set prices automatically using a bonding curve mechanism known as constant product.

By Ganesh on January 30, 2019

TLDR; We are writing a 5-part series on “10x analytics” using the CryptoKitties’ blockchain dataset. We’ve combined on-chain Ethereum transaction data with off-chain API data to deep-dive into their business model and revenue metrics behind the game. We’ve also open-sourced the SQL code behind the analysis if you want to follow along. 😍

CryptoKitties is one of the most popular games on the Ethereum blockchain. Players collect and breed kitties, which are unique digital assets. Ownership is tracked via the Ethereum blockchain and a network of smart contracts allow for buying, selling and breeding of these digital assets.

Fortunately for us, the game is completely decentralized and all the player data lives on the Ethereum blockchain. The data on the blockchain is pretty disorganized, but we can use a tool like Covalent to make that data more understandable to a mere data analyst like myself.