The Covalent Blog

By Niall on December 3, 2020

VANCOUVER, December 3rd, 2020 – Fresh off of their oversubscribed funding round of $3.1m from top-tier cryptocurrency investment firms, Covalent, a leading blockchain data analytics provider, is acquiring Byzantine Labs, a blockchain startup incubator and consultancy based in Vancouver, BC for an undisclosed amount. The Byzantine Labs team will be joining Covalent’s product and engineering departments. Click below for the full press release.

By Harish on December 1, 2020

“I think in a few years, you will be another Snowflake…”

That’s the sheer potential of this young and relentless Vancouver-based big data startup which just raised $3.1M USD in funding in an oversubscribed round to build the future of blockchain data analytics.

By Niall on November 30, 2020

For those that missed it, Covalent CEO Ganesh Swami and Reef CEO Denko Mancheski held a joint AMA to discuss the product integration and the future prospects of the partnership. Thanks for hosting us Reef!

By Niall on November 24, 2020

Calling all Twitter Bards, Pen Assassins and Master Artists. Following a hugely successful number of weeks for Dungeons & Data, we are incredibly excited to announce the winners across these three categories. Everyone at Covalent was completely blown away by the level of creativity, work and detail that went into these submissions and for that, we are extremely grateful to have such an engaging and talented community. Also, thank you for your patience as we determined the winners. It was not easy.

By Niall on November 19, 2020

VANCOUVER, November 19th, 2020 - Covalent is happy to announce a partnership with DeepDAO, a platform that collects and organizes a variety of quantitative and qualitative data about DAOs, presenting it to the public in the form of an interactive dashboard.

By Niall on November 18, 2020

VANCOUVER, November 18th, 2020 - Covalent is delighted to be integrating with AllianceBlock, a decentralized, blockchain-agnostic layer 2 that bridges traditional and decentralized finance and automates the process of converting any digital or crypto asset into a bankable product.

By Niall on November 17, 2020

Can you scale the curve? As part of Covalent’s Dungeons & Data competition, we are excited to release to our community a comprehensive set of rich historical and granular CSV files for analysis. Dungeons & Data participants will have the opportunity to analyze, transform and visualize this dataset for prizes. The competition has various challenge levels, as they require different amounts of effort and expertise with data transformation and visualization. So depending on your available time and experience with data science, choose something fitting, start your data journey and most importantly, have fun!

There are many competitions available as part of Dungeons & Data – the data science portion is known as Data Barbarians.

By Niall on November 13, 2020

VANCOUVER, November 13th, 2020 - Covalent is pleased to announce a technical partnership with Polkastarter, a DEX built for cross-chain token pools and auctions, enabling projects to raise capital on a decentralized, permissionless, and interoperable environment based on Polkadot. The killer feature of Polkastarter is the possibility of making cross-chain swaps, powered by the Polkadot ecosystem, which can provide higher throughput for faster and cheaper transactions while staying connected to the Ethereum Network and other blockchains for liquidity.

By Niall on November 11, 2020

VANCOUVER, November 11th, 2020 - Covalent is delighted to announce a partnership with UpBots, an all-in-one platform that brings together the best crypto trading tools and strategies that are generally stand-alone services. It provides a 360° trading experience where users simply choose what best suits their profile.

By Niall on November 9, 2020

Certainly an exciting month here at Covalent! Following our fundraising announcement, we announced a number of partnerships, collaborated with top-tier projects and launched the world’s biggest blockchain data competition which is still on-going. Not to mention, our team is continuing to expand.

By Niall on November 5, 2020

VANCOUVER, November 4th, 2020 - Covalent is delighted to announce that we are partnering with Shyft Network, a blockchain public protocol that allows encrypted, attested and secure data transfers while enabling anyone to develop applications and infrastructure for global citizenship, trusted data and regulatory-compliant privacy.

By Erik on October 30, 2020

“I don’t think the market is big enough for your company…”

That’s what I told Ganesh Swami when we met in a coffee shop back in August 2018 after hearing about Covalent for the first time.

“Maybe it isn’t, but it will be…” was Ganesh’s response.

By Niall on October 29, 2020

VANCOUVER, October 29th, 2020 - Covalent, the leading blockchain data API, has integrated with CryptoSheets, a dynamic platform complete with powerful analytic tools for investors, analysts, developers, and students. From DeFi, derivatives, ICO, crypto funds, volatility, taxonomy, portfolio analysis, historical scenarios to on-chain metrics, smart contract logs and advanced crypto fundamentals data, Cryptosheets has the solution for users of all skill levels.

By Niall on October 26, 2020

Can you tame the unicorn? As part of Covalent’s Dungeons & Data competition, we are excited to release to our community a comprehensive set of rich historical and granular CSV files for analysis. Dungeons & Data participants will have the opportunity to analyze, transform and visualize this dataset for prizes. The competition has various challenge levels, as they require different amounts of effort and expertise with data transformation and visualization. So depending on your available time and experience with data science, choose something fitting, start your data journey and most importantly, have fun!

There are many competitions available as part of Dungeons & Data – the data science portion is known as Data Barbarians.

By Niall on October 23, 2020

VANCOUVER, October 23rd, 2020 - Covalent, the leading blockchain data API, is excited to announce a technical partnership with Reef, a cross-chain DeFi operating system built on Polkadot that provides users with universal access to liquidity existing on both centralized and decentralized exchanges.

By Niall on October 21, 2020

VANCOUVER, October 21st, 2020 - Covalent, a leading blockchain querying service, is excited to announce a strategic partnership with Frontier, a DeFi suite in which users can access their DeFi positions on various protocols. Through this partnership, Frontier is able to display granular asset data, giving its users an enhanced view of their positions.

By Niall on October 20, 2020

Today we are excited to announce that the Puzzle part of our Dungeons & Data crypto-data challenge has been launched following the successful conclusion of the first Puzzle round.

The Puzzle Paladin challenge is a sequence of brainteasers, designed to help participants exercise their logic and puzzle-solving skills. And of course, have fun!

By Niall on October 15, 2020

VANCOUVER, October 15th, 2020 - Covalent is excited to announce a technical partnership with ZeroSwap, a multi-chain protocol with liquidity mining, DeFi token offerings and DEX aggregation. This partnership comes in the wake of ZeroSwap understanding that the tooling required to understand what is going on with each transaction at the block level is still nascent. Fortunately, Covalent is positioned to bring data transparency and visibility to blockchain assets.

By Niall on October 14, 2020

Covalent is the leading solution to the blockchain data provision market, but we can’t just hoard all that precious high-quality data ourselves, so we decided to host this crypto-data competition. Aside from plenty of activities that do not necessarily require data-related skillsets, but rather a sharp mind and/or a creative vision (such as our upcoming Quest or Art competition), we also host plenty of data science challenges, all enabled by Covalent’s powerful blockchain indexers. So if you are an up and coming blockchain data analyst (or just a hobbyist, we don’t discriminate), come check our challenges!

By Niall on September 23, 2020

On September 22nd, we participated in our first AMA! Thank you to the Pramod Global Crypto Community for hosting us and bombarding us with questions. It was a lot of fun. Below, you can find the questions asked, along with our answers.

By Ganesh on August 11, 2020

The founders of Covalent (Ganesh Swami) and Blocknative (Chris Meisl) come together to share insights on blockchain data. There are two parts to the presentation: 1) Chris shares how data gets onto the blockchain and 2) Ganesh shares how data can be extracted from the blockchain.

By Byron on August 3, 2020

TLDR; SafeKeep is the only DeFi portfolio tracker that displays all of your DeFi assets in one place. This includes Uniswap trading pairs, TokenSet trading sets, Balancer pools and more.

By Natasha on July 27, 2020

TLDR; Parabola.io allows you to build data workflows with no code. An application of Covalent’s API is that it can be imported into Parabola to allow users to create data-rich applications on top of it, such as one with MakerDAO collateralization ratios.

By Byron on July 14, 2020

TLDR; SafeKeep is the only place to get a truly complete understanding of your MakerDAO assets, debts and Vault activity. This includes every single action that changes your collateral or debt, including the historical fiat prices, stability fees, previously closed CDPs/Valts and support for every single collateral types that has been added to Maker in the recent past.

By Byron on July 4, 2020

TLDR; We showcase another feature of SafeKeep that is critical for mainstream adoption. Everyday users expects to see a “bank statement” style view of their Ethereum transactions with every transaction that changes their account balances. SafeKeep shows users this view and we explain why naive approaches miss crucial data.

By Ganesh on June 23, 2020

Covalent is going to Singapore (virtually) to participate in the next EthSingapore meetup. Ganesh (Covalent’s co-founder) will be giving a talk on the challenges with querying data on blockchains.

By Byron on June 21, 2020

TLDR; Last week, we officially launched the public beta of SafeKeep and discussed two key features aimed at sophisticated DeFi investors. Today, we are showcasing another use-case: Compound Finance tracking. Compound Finance, one of the leading DeFi protocols has just begun the distribution of its native governance token – COMP. In this post, we will showcase the features of SafeKeep that make it one of a kind.

By Byron on June 10, 2020

TLDR; With the official public beta launch of SafeKeep, we are counting down the top 10 reasons why SafeKeep is the best and the only place to get a truly comprehensive understanding of your DeFi holdings. Up next is feature #9: Ethereum Name Service (ENS) compatibility.

By Byron on June 8, 2020

TLDR; After having been in private beta for the past 3 months, we are excited to announce the public beta launch of SafeKeep, the fastest, most comprehensive and integrated record-keeping app for your crypto assets. With such a large amount of real-world finances locked up in DeFi protocols, it is imperative that sophisticated DeFi investors have a clear understanding on just exactly what is going on with their crypto-holdings. Over the next few weeks, we will be counting down the top 10 ways that SafeKeep allows unparalleled insight into your crypto assets. Let’s get started!

By Ganesh on June 3, 2020

Despite all the progress we’ve made in crypto tooling the last couple of years, one difficult task remains unsolved: extracting data from blockchains. Blockchain data is messy, disorganized and time-consuming even for an experienced engineer. Today, we are excited to announce a software development kit (SDK) to query data from the Ethereum blockchain – a problem we’ve been trying to solve for many years. We’ve been dogfooding the SDK internally for the last few months and used it to instrument over 20 DeFi protocols supporting over a dozen customers and thousands of users.

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.

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.

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.

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.