Blockchain Data Analytics Needs an Upgrade; Covalent Review

Chadley McKnight
4 min readNov 22, 2020

Crypto is getting crowded and Ethereum-only data analytics is not enough.

Dune Analytics, an amazing Ethereum data analytics software is helping the work of journalists, fund managers, crypto enthusiasts, and Ethereum developers. However, it’s limited only to Ethereum data, but it doesn’t have to be.

The blockchain industry has been growing rapidly and moving beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum in a spectacular way. With the release of the Polkadot platform, another Ethereum competitor is born, but this platform is not the only one. Algorand, EOS, NEO, Stratis, Lisk, ARK, Qtum, and Cardano all offer similar smart contract capabilities as Ethereum.

They are all competitors with one another, however the technology is still nascent, even after ten years in the making since Bitcoin’s initial release. Experts believe that DeFi will continue to grow and we’ve seen what happens when Ethereum gets congested.

When the whales are swimming, everybody else is struggling to find a good moment to even make a transaction on Ethereum. This means there’s more room for growth, and Ethereum competitors are inevitably going to get a piece of the pie.

Preparations for the future

In a blockchain agnostic future, decentralized finance will no longer rely on any one network. Users will have many opportunities to take advantage of the best possible payment flows, helping them avoid unnecessary fees and providing the result they need.

The resulting ecosystem will feature many layers of blockchains each relying on foundational systems. Users will have assets on multiple chains at any given time, making cross-chain wallets a necessary invention in the near future.

One Canadian start-up that clearly sees the need to structure data beyond Ethereum and work to develop a data standard for all DeFi applications and smart contracts.

Covalent is creating the richest blockchain dataset on the internet, and makes it available to developers without any specialization requirements. Instead of having devs spend hundreds of work hours developing a system for their project, they can leverage Covalent’s solution instead.

They are keen on empowering the pioneers of tomorrow by building the most powerful data infrastructure today. In their efforts they are also pushing the cutting edge of standardization, having developed a solution that can translate all blockchain data into a single unified API.

Covalent is pushing new ground

Blockchain technology has grown rapidly over the last couple of years and now a wide range of companies have realized its potential in the last 2–3 years.

By structuring data generated by all smart contracts and protocols, Covalent offers developers a unique tool in the fight against messy data. Their enterprise-level API supports a variety of use-cases such as wallets, exchanges, taxation, custodianship, and manages to do that with a no-code approach that requires zero config.

In addition, they are providing tools for data scientists to push the cutting edge of crypto to the next level with their DeFi SDK.

Covalent’s solution eliminates many objections that businesses have to avoid adopting blockchain. There’s no more unnecessary technical complexities, messy business integration, and unstructured data. There is no longer a reason for businesses to avoid building blockchain solutions, as most of the costs have already been paid by Covalent.

All they have to develop is their product and all of the publicly available blockchain data can be easily implemented via a RESTful API.

The Covalent Value Proposition

In the pursuit of making business using blockchain simpler, Covalent is determined to make blockchain data accessible and usable for all companies.

Blockchain data, besides being immense, is not available in an organized format. Extracting meaningful insights out of it using existing asset management tools is futile. The task becomes further complicated as these tools are not built on scalable infrastructure, causing two important logistical problems:

  1. Average data analysis becomes difficult and resource hungry as the blockchain platform scales up.
  2. Properly evaluating crypto assets is challenging, let alone attaining valuation for complicated crypto investments like staking, and accounting for impermanent loss.

Developers no longer need to rely on aggregated price feeds to supply accurate investment data for their users. They no longer have to spend resources on pulling and categorizing data directly from the blockchain.

The Covalent Solution

Covalent’s powerful API has already completed the data collection and organization work for developers providing them with real “money legos” that they can combine to create amazing and accurate DeFi products for their users.

Covalent has indexed over 200,000 smart contracts, 25 billion transactions, and 30,000 price feeds, and this data is updated every 30 seconds.

Covalent offers meaningful, actionable insights by analyzing and aggregating data from trillions of data points utilizing Big-Data technologies. These widely varied types of sources include chains, nodes, data feeds, etc.

Developers can then receive this data in whatever form they choose, directly in their products through the Covalent API. They can request current and historical data for any address or DeFi product on the market, at a moment’s notice.

Conclusion

Crypto, blockchain, and DeFi are growing fast and the need to scale up grows accordingly. The number of cryptocurrency users is growing rapidly worldwide and the entire industry is swiftly becoming blockchain agnostic.

In such a world, data analytics focused on one blockchain is useful, however for the purposes of developing remarkable products, more is required. Not only data sharing as created and measured by the community, but rather a structured and standardized approach to blockchain data.

Covalent is a Canadian blockchain startup that is dedicated to eliminate blind spots in DeFi, track and mimic its growth and provide consistent value to developers through the use of a unified API that nurtures transparency and visibility of assets across all blockchain networks.

Covalent is building a foundation data source for the future, and this is recognized by the many partnerships and institutional investors that have bet on the success of this startup.

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Chadley McKnight

Into Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Publications and relations, and also a journalist