News about Covalent's product launches and company updates.
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.
Read more 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.
Read more 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.
Read more 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.
Read more 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.
Read more 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.
Read more 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.
Read more 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!
Read more 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.
Read more 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.
Read more By Ganesh on December 31, 2018
The year 2018 marks our first year of operations at Covalent. Here’s a letter I shared with our stakeholders – staff, investors, partners and customers on our progress in 2018 and where we see the growth opportunities for 2019.
Read more By Ganesh on November 28, 2018
One of the unique quirks at our company Covalent is how much emphasis we put on onboarding new team mates. We have specific 1-day, 1-week and 30-day milestones for them to meet. From the various companies I’ve worked at, a clear onboarding checklist was critical to getting a new team mate immersed in the company culture, policies and processes. As part of our onboarding checklist, we assign a “homework” assignment.
Read more By Ganesh on November 19, 2018
Today, my team at Covalent is proud to announce the introduction of Covalent Research to the world. Covalent Research is the first of its kind to provide independent, unbiased industry research on various blockchain projects and crypto-tokens. Our agenda is to use data to tell you what you need to pay attention to and what you can ignore.
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