January 2023: New Balances Engine Offers Improved Performance, Covalent Migrates the Network, and Analyzing the World of Avalanche App Chains 🔥
TLDR:
New balances engine offers increased performance and response times for developers.
Covalent successfully migrates Phase 1 of the network, from Nomad CQT to the Wormhole Bridge CQT.
Scale the Next Wave of App Chains and GameFi in new research post analyzing billions of rows of deep, granular, historical data directly from the Avalanche ecosystem.
Join the Bear Market Builders movement recently launched and celebrate the thousands of projects in the greater Web3 ecosystem.
Introduction:
January was a month of relentless innovation, hailing a number of new and exciting product updates, along with never-before-seen initiatives in Web3, continuing on with the same velocity that we closed the year with in 2022. Covalent has, and always will be, grateful for the bear market and the opportunity it provides to focus on what truly matters: building.
Unified API:
This month we conducted extensive user outreach as we rolled out the Premium API tier. The new balances engine provides a faster, better, and cheaper option for developers while offering a more consistent and scalable response behaviour. Covalent was ecstatic to see that the feedback on the scope and performance of the Covalent Unified API was overwhelmingly positive. We even closed multiple enterprise deals (with details to be announced next month) which underscore the product-market fit and data needs met by the industry leading Covalent API.
The Covalent Knowledge Base:
Our builders are our most valued members of our community, so maintaining our Knowledge Base and Documentation is always one of our top priorities. In January, we uploaded three new posts to help anyone needing to use our Unified API:
The Covalent Network:
Covalent successfully completed the migration of the Covalent Network staking contract on January 18th, moving from Nomad to Wormhole, the new bridge of choice to enable the secure bridging of CQT to other networks. Wormhole is a bridging platform with a generic message-passing protocol that connects to multiple chains with minimal downtime.
This initiative was the result of a massive undertaking from the team at Covalent to make the community whole after the unfortunate incident of the Nomad hack. We were grateful to have been assisted with two highly reputable auditors, Quantstamp and Safepress, in order to ensure the contract used for the migration was fully certified and secure prior to the migration date (January 18, 2023 PT).
The utmost care to planning and consideration was taken to ensure all operators and delegators that had staked CQT before the Nomad hack were going to made whole by migrating our underlying token on the Moonbeam network from the Nomad CQT (“madCQT”), to the fully-backed Wormhole CQT (“WholeCQT”). The overall process was seamless from the delegators and operators perspectives as all their delegations and rewards remained intact. But most importantly, everyone can now once again Bridge in and out of the Moonbeam ecosystem with a 1:1 backed CQT token.
Overall, this migration represented a resurgence of the Covalent Network and provided a beacon of strength and resilience to our community, regardless of the current macroeconomic conditions that we’re excited to continue forward into 2023 and beyond.
Pioneering the App Chain Frontier:
Covalent prides itself on constantly leading the march to be the number one indexer in the space, which includes being the first data indexer to index app chains in Web3. On January 26th, David Tso, Growth & Customer Success at Covalent, published the article Avalanche Subnets: Scaling the Next Wave of AppChains and Game Fi . This blog post indexed every single block, smart contract, event, and transaction across billions of rows of verifiable data to analyze Avalanche subnets and bring newfound visibility to data in GameFi.
2022 - Year of Firsts
On January 9th Covalent published the 2022 Annual Report, highlighting our “Year of Firsts”. We were the first to index app chains, the first to index zkEVM roll-ups, first to index the most number of chains in a single year (over 50!), received our first governance proposals, irst foray into non-EVM indexing, first to launch a cryptographically verified data pipeline, first to write the most comprehensive GameFi analytics resource, first-of-its-kind data analyst training bootcamp, launched our first phase of the Covalent Network, first time to appear on national television and first time ever participating in IRL Web3 community-centric events and conferences. By never losing sight of our mission building relentlessly despite the conditions the bear market brought upon us, Covalent was still able to look back at an incredibly exciting year - still only a prelude as to what’s to come in 2023.
Bear Market Builders @BMB_Nation
January 12th marked a huge day for Covalent, as it was the launch of a campaign targeted at celebrating the developers in Web3 still building in the bear market and all of the innovative apps using the Covalent Unified API. This campaign is the first-of-its kind to be seen in Web3, let alone to be running during the current climate, but as a data indexer, Covalent recognizes that there is #NoBearMarketForBuilders. Now everyone will be able to see the entire collection of featured projects all connected in a single thread (on Twitter), much like the diversity and connections created in Web3 and the work they are doing no matter the market conditions.
Covalent would like to give recognition to each and every single project that’s building right now, both featured already in our campaign and all of those yet to be announced. Keep on building!
Community Call #17
On January 26th, Covalent was excited to kick off the year with our community and hold our 17th Community Call. Despite being only one month into 2023, there was lots to cover including our 2022 year in review, the Covalent Network Migration, our Bear Market Builders campaign, API updates, and going to ETHDenver!
Watch the recording ICYMI: Community Call #17
Happy Lunar New Year and Year of the Rabbit!
Covalent was excited to celebrate the Year of the Rabbit with everyone in our community. 🐇
Builder Zone:
Covalent and Oasis: Joint Developer Webinar
On January 5th, Leibing Guo, Developer Relations at Covalent, participated in a developer webinar with William Wendt, Ecosystem Growth Manager at Oasis talking all about Oasis and how to access on-chain, verifiable data using the Covalent Unified API.
Recording ICYMI: Covalent and Oasis Developer Webinar
Press Related Mentions:
Article by Woodstock: The March to be the #1 Data Indexer
Read about Woodstock and Covalent’s Partnership: We have been on a long journey with @Covalent_HQ ever since we spoke to the team for the first time in 2020. We have penned down our thoughts on why we are excited about Covalent -
Blockchain Show Podcast: Ganesh Swami / Covalent - Blockchain Visibility
Listen to Ganesh on this podcast highlighting: data analysis and trends within crypto industry (across NFTs, DEXs, wallets, more) Price movement and market trends Entrepreneurship and bringing Web3 products to the market Transitioning from Web2 to Web3; mainstream adoption of Web3.
Barron’s Press: Stocks Drop as Investors Mull Loosening Covid Restrictions in China
Article featuring comment from Ganesh: “It’s doubtful we’ll be entering a bull market any time soon,” said Ganesh Swami, CEO of blockchain data group Covalent. “The macro backdrop is just too uncertain … the best-case scenario would be a slow crawl upwards.”
Article on Coindesk.com: 4th Quarter Market Outlook: The CoinDesk Computing Index (CPU) Article featuring thought leadership by Ganesh: The Computing sector suffered some of the same doubts applied to centralized entities in the wake of FTX collapse, raising the question of how to decentralize both front- and back-end systems, or both web-hosting services and cloud services, according to Ganesh Swami, co-founder and CEO of blockchain data organization Covalent.
“The industry is still so nascent that the reliance on the centralized, incumbent systems for the infrastructure is still very much an issue for a number of blockchain ecosystems,” Swami told CoinDesk. Such reliance presents problems in terms of “exposing their networks to single points of failure,” he added.
Heading into 2023, Swami said the decentralized infrastructure projects in the sector will play "a more prominent role" that will make the broader ecosystem "much more durable and censorship resistant."
ETHDenver 2023 #YearoftheSpork
Covalent is excited to once again be a Cypher Sponsor for the second year in a row! This specific hackathon is near and dear to Covalent, as it was at this event that the co-founders Ganesh Swami and Levi Aul were able to kickstart the Covalent mission and drive a profitable organization that’s now grown to a team of over 50 employees. More details for our booth and talks are yet to come so stay tuned on our Twitter for the latest and most up-to-date information.
Follow @Covalent_HQ 🐦
Covalent and Neon Labs: Twitter Spaces AMA
Mark your calendars! On February 2nd, Leibing Guo, along with Pascal Kurzawa, Grants Manager, and Vladimir Bugaev, VP of Engineering, of Neon Labs will be holding a Twitter spaces AMA to talk all about opportunities for developers in Web3 and how to access on-chain data using the Covalent Unified API.
