Covalent 🛠 Building in Web3 with One Unified API

foreign [Applause] [Music] thanks for coming I'm Leilani or lay I'm a product marketing manager at covalent so I think I've seen a couple of you at our booth this morning um or all through the day really I'm just going to give an overview of covalent how you can use it and how it might be useful for this hackathon and this is kind of the broad agenda for the talk so before we get started if I haven't kind of given you this feel already at the booth at some point today covalent is an indexing company for blockchain data so what we have is an API that's actually free and it's unified so you can use it across all the different chains that we index which currently is 35 different blockchains and then you can basically build multi-chain applications pretty quickly it's a rest API and it's also read only so those are kind of like the ground details before we get into the rest of the presentation common use cases are like wallets nft galleries but any on-chain data you can pull into your applications with us so yeah I'll cover some of the data challenges just so you get an overview of like how we compare to other Solutions go a little more into the API how to access it get started and then our Bounty info because we are doing a ten thousand dollar Bounty for East New York so and it's a general Bounty so if you use the API at all you're actually eligible for a part of that prize money so kind of how we usually start off these presentations maybe if you've participated in each Global hackathons before you might have actually seen one of these kind of talks that we do in overviews but covalent's always really been focused on the future interoperability and just gambling on like real Mass adoption of blockchains whether or not that's in a defy landscape I like the woo um or like whether or not you even know you're using a blockchain so in the future we see Millions maybe billions of pieces of information on chain um I should update that slide actually because I think like there's already dozens of blockchains um and lots of applications which means also lots of users and initially when covalent was developed it was with this in mind which was that data was going to be very complicated and in demand especially because blockchains are not all the same they use very different architecture we've seen the evm model and now the non-evm model and it can be challenging to standardized data across those to access them to learn new tools and new ecosystems and all of the things that come with that so that's kind of where we saw the data challenges and what we wanted to address so what it kind of boils down to is interoperability and this is everything from like users so if you've even just used the D5 protocol or bought an nft or really done anything in the web 3 space you notice that it's pretty fragmented there are different solutions across different chains and a lot of solutions are kind of in silos so especially for developers like yourselves if you're building applications and you have that user Persona in mind where you want to aggregate their data perhaps to make that ux or UI a little bit easier there isn't really there aren't many solutions to actually do that and there's also just so much data on the blockchain in general so doing the indexing work yourselves or running your own infrastructure could be pretty challenging because it's just adding an element on top of what you already want to build um so this is like a little bit more into the data challenges I know I'm like really Illuminating the problems here um but not only is it complicated it can be expensive if you have your own if you have experience like running your own notes perhaps you know that the more you scale the more your project grows the more you're also paying and at some point that's quite a barrier I think to a lot of growth in some interesting use cases also missing delayed data lack of Standards blah blah blah blah there's a lot of problems um I don't think we need to illuminate every single thing because if you've spent time building in this space you probably have run into these problems um so that kind of leads me into the covalent API I hope you can see that QR code it's just going to take you to our website which is the point of contact for signing up for an API key which is free but also for all of the information that I'm going to cover throughout the presentation so if you want to follow along you can do that and I'll go into some of those links as well um it's one solution to access all on-chain data so the unified aspect as I mentioned before Aggregates different apis across different blockchains so that you're only really interfacing with one tool and you do that through what's called a chain ID in the future might be a chain name um we're just trying to make that the easiest possible experience for developers but basically if you built a project on ethereum and you want to include polygon or you want to include another chain that your users might be on you just have to change a parameter to be able to add that in so it's super useful for focusing on multi-chain applications it's also useful for all historical data granular transaction data really anything on the Chain we index and what's nice about the unified API is that it's a standard request and response format so we're pretty big on developing a standard for data so that again you're not kind of like Reinventing the wheel every single time you build something new um so yeah you can get really familiar with the tool and the response and then as we scale you skill that's kind of the idea with this there's also no code required so recently I'll show you the docs in a little bit but we did develop an analyst mode because we saw that a lot of kind of normal users or people dipping their toes into web3 want to be able to understand the data and make quick insights and cut through the kind of the noise on Twitter and things like that so that is a useful feature as well so this is kind of where we fit in the crypto stack the question I think we get pretty commonly because there are a lot of different infrastructure Solutions out there um there's people that both read and write to the blockchain we are kind of a read-only layer so you can think of the blockchains as the blockchains I guess they're the foundation where the data lives the nodes are the way that you interact with those blockchains so without covalent you'd be running your own nodes paying a node provider or using some other kind of solutions but where we sit is between that and the application layer so really what we support is just those applications on top so if you need to display any kind of data or pull in those feeds into your applications whatever you're doing we just make it easier so that you don't have to do all those steps beforehand you don't have to run your own nodes you don't have to like write complex queries you just make API calls and the data is instant so that's kind of how we see supporting like the the scaling issues of just development in the ecosystem I think at this point we've seen reports that there's pretty small group of developers so I think a big chunk of the active ones in web3 are actually at these events because I think I read there's 30 000 active like monthly developers in web 3 which when you think about that globally it's really not a lot um so in order to make that process easier you need better onboarding tools or things that people are just familiar in general like apis people understand apis and we can simplify that language and make it easier for more people to build in this space so that's kind of how we see empowering more users again kind of just supporting adoption in general because as much as it's really exciting to meet like your small little tribe at these events to support the mainstream and to to make it for all of us we need to make it easier for people that have like no experience or don't know what any of these things mean um so these are kind of our two main users developers like yourselves maybe crypto isn't the right word maybe web3 is a little bit better but developers and then analysts so really in the past year I think we saw like a lot more mainstream news applications covering the crypto markets and if you've read some of those articles I don't know where they get the data it's like not always accurate it is hard to find um just granular accurate data that is easy to access so if you don't have that you can rely on on misinformation or on other sites that might not be giving you like the most I mean it's just better to be able to do things yourself and verify yourself anyway with that in mind we did develop an analyst mode so with the API if you use it in a developer mode you'll get a Json response but if you switch it to analyst mode in our docs which I'll show you you can actually just download those directly as csvs or you can see it as a spreadsheet in the browser so even if you are a developer and if you have limited time at these hackathons I think it's a really useful way to just visualize the data because you can clearly see like all the columns that you'd be getting what those values are so there's a little bit about our ecosystem some of the bigger projects that use us but also just you know the proof that a lot of developers have tried out covalent and yeah really enjoy the ease and the speed of working with it I think especially because you have a tight turnaround of these hackathons it's kind of nice to have one solution that you can really experiment with it's good for beginners as well but also bigger projects that again kind of want that like standard response multi-chain capabilities and everything else that we support so just a little bit about our Network one of the questions that we used to get a lot is are you decentralized how does that work with web3 it is important to a lot of people in this ecosystem we actually are decentralizing and we took a big step a couple months ago with launching single-sided staking and launching um what is called a block specimen producer I'm not going to get too into the details because I don't think that's the most relevant if you want to learn more you can talk to me after but basically it's a first proof-based extraction mechanism for the blockchain so what we do is we uh we have validators that are running our block specimen we extract the data and then they verify that it is like they verified it with a cryptographic signature that is accurate so that's a really important part of our decentralization step and throughout the rest of the year we plan to decentralize the storage the indexing the querying really probably in like a quarter by quarter format so we're looking at about a year roadmap but of course things are kind of you know flexible in that way but yeah yeah that would be the universal decentralized data model for multi-trade indexing and querying it's quite a complex sentence but you get it we're decentralizing so this is a little bit more on the Bounty that we're providing um for East New York so ten thousand dollars in stable coins each Newark itself actually distributes that um so yeah but uh basically it's just meaningful use of the API so we like to keep it open because actually our slogan is one unified API one billion possibilities when you're a data provider you don't really like gear people in a certain direction it's better to actually just see what comes out of events like these and I really like the unique use cases so if you have a weird idea in mind and you need any sort of on-chain data the most useful endpoint I think is like log events you can scrape through those you can do that by topic hash you can go through the contracts um but we do have like specific endpoints for nfts for instance specific balances endpoints I'll show you those in the docs as well so by meaningful use um the top Rises of 3000 the minimum price is 500 and basically uh we judge it based on light complexity and the creativity of the use case so if you do combine more than one endpoint you're typically eligible to win more but if you integrate covalent at all with other Solutions or whatever you want to do that's totally okay and you'll be eligible to win part of that bounty so I can go to those details a little bit more in depth once we get into my other links so here's kind of the primary developer resources one is our covalent docs obviously when you try a new product you go to the docs to see how it all works so on there you can see supported networks more info on the blockchains that we actually support and how you can use those endpoints you can also see how-to guides you can see some of the other Tech that we have built on top of the API that's an option for you to use then there's the API reference itself so that is the extension of the docs where you can actually try the API live in the browser so we added that feature um last year and it was a really important thing for us again to make that onboarding experience a little bit easier so you can actually see exactly what the data is that you'll be getting before you go before you go ahead and build something with it so you can try all of the endpoints live in the browser and you can view that response and you can see the fields and everything like that before you may pull it into another solution and then the third important resource if you've been by our booth I've probably plugged this to you as well is our code templates so we've started to build out more code templates components tutorials just kind of focusing on onboarding more people into that ecosystem and we have a giveaway going on that if you go to that link for our code templates you start our repository you enter to win airpods Pros which we'll give out at the end of this conference so yeah and now I'm actually going to like go to these links uh okay it's a little bit complicated on here okay so is that like showing my whole screen yet is we love to see it there we go so this is what our docs look like um you have an overview of pretty much everything that I just said so what covalent is um apps that are building on us and then the sidebars where you can get the rest of the information this is covalent hq.com Docs and what you can do is expand the developer tools you can see the updates that we've recently made here we do that month by month you can see primer which is kind of similar to mongodb it's like another thing that you can do to customize your API queries and you can click on supported networks so this is where we show all of the information on our blockchain partners we're adding these like crazy right now it's been a really big year for indexing for us um so yeah stay up to date with those because it's pretty exciting but if you go to click on them for instance you can just see um the chain ID a little bit more details oh yeah I wasn't going to click on anything because the Wi-Fi is not great so I probably shouldn't have done that whoopsy Daisy stop okay um and then yeah there's a little bit more on here we actually did have a a network section of our docs as well oopsie Daisy um just if you want to learn more about that decentralized component and how how the API is connected to our Network and how it all connects um so you can browse these at your leisure and you can ask us questions in the booth so moving to our API reference um this is where you can actually see the endpoints that we provide and this is where you can test them as well again I'm sorry Wi-Fi so I can't really do it right now but I was just informed that they're pushing a big fix so um stay tuned for that but we have been broken down into some categories so these are what we call Class A and points and then we have further further categorization in there so broadly we separate into balances nft transactions and base so balances um this is the most used endpoint that we have we kind of started with balances and it's been our rock ever since and we are making more improvements to it um on a continual basis but especially in the next quarter it's going to be revamped and faster again so when you get uh in other Solutions you can query like does this wallet hold this exact token for instance with our balances endpoint um you put in a wallet address and it just shows every single token that they have so it's a really good way for aggregating balances data for building wallets or just anything where you want to display a user's assets on chain and you can again do that across multiple chains our nft endpoints um a lot of these were developed in the last year just because nfts became such a huge Trend and a huge space for developers to innovate um so you can get metadata for nfts like the images themselves the gifs whatever that is also the attributes this is kind of more used for building like nft galleries or uh or speculation tools for instance we've seen people build like predictive tools for whether a collection is going to go up or down so cool things like that and yeah nfts are a fun creative project for hackathons for sure because it's visual so if you're if you're thinking of doing that we can support you there transactions so a lot more of these are used in like D5 use cases so you can just show a user's actual activity on chain I'll kind of go into that a little further and then base so base is just things like to get a block a date and time anything that you might need to help support your other queries Class A endpoints can be done across every single chain so if you want to see the supported chains oops you can click the drop down here and it's going to show you all of the chains that we index and you can switch between them yeah it'll show you their IDs everything you need to know and if again you want more details you go to the docs and then um we have class B so Class B originated as just like protocol specific endpoints um we actually only have this one on here right now but it's a very powerful set so if you're familiar with like x y equals K it's the amm model that uni swap B2 popularized um that a lot of uh other swaps have like forked and cloned so pancake Swap and spirit Swap and like a lot of the swaps basically um so what you can do with this endpoint is you can query all of the Dex data where they use that model so it's a lot of the decks is in the market you can get pools spot prices volume any sort of decentralized exchange data really useful if you're doing sort of Dex analytics and we do support a lot of those clients as well with their info pages so if you're building something like that x y equals K is a really powerful tool to use at the bottom here too you just have a couple pricing endpoints um that are always useful so yeah that's an overview of the docs and now I'll show you that code templates thing that I was talking about so if you come by our booth or if you copy the link in this presentation it's going to take you to the web3 starter resources these are some useful things that we're consistently adding to to help people get started so we do a little bit of the work and you can Fork it and modify it and basically just use these in whatever builds you want so again if you go to this and you where's the star I already started but if you start then you're eligible to win those airpods um this is what it looks like so right now we have in X Y equals K decks dashboard template so the ones that I just mentioned where you can show all of that different data um you can fork and clone this and modify it it looks kind of like this at its base so we've built this out um you could switch the different exchanges um oh yeah I'm only on ethereum so it's those two but you can switch the chain supported over here you can see all the different chains that this supports and then it'll populate the different exchanges supported on those as well it even has like a little sentiment analysis thing and this is again just like the very base so you can improve this but if you are looking for like a quick thing to build maybe this is somewhere for you to get started and then we have a price tracker Chrome extension as well I haven't played around with this as much but uh I recommend checking it out we're getting a little more into widgets lately uh oh you're welcome uh we're getting more into widgets lately and components so if you are interested in integrating those into your into your apps or whatever you're building it's another quick addition that you can you can yeah quickly add in it might add some Pizzazz to your project and the re the readme's for these kind of give you all that you need to know so oops where am I going yeah and then just at the bottom here we have a code along so we're starting to do a couple more of those as well um it's just like a python notebook that you can follow along and get started um with yeah there's also like a little bit of a narrative in this one but you can get started with our API and see what that would look like as well so just to give a little bit more info on the Bounty you pull up this page hopefully the writing is like a decent size I think I can there we go cool so as I mentioned the API is super useful for nft store friends on chain analytics wallets a lot of these are popular use cases that some of our bigger customers who are around sponsoring also use this for and if you want ever to have like a more in-depth conversation on how that works you can also come see me at the booth or ask me afterwards but this is kind of broadly how we look at judging so one to five on each of the key factors which is the creativity and feasibility is kind of a big part this was more relevant I think I think in like the bull market when you just saw everybody building things like kind of for no reason which was it which was great but you know what I mean so people that are looking to solve a key problem obviously that's awesome in judging we take that into consideration and then which endpoints you used um I still really recommend checking out log events uh because that's just like the most versatile endpoint for anything you might want to query and then the user experience is a factor I always just advise people maybe this is the first hackathon or maybe you've done a lot but good design goes like a long way because it makes you more noticeable and it's awesome and then the technical competence so basically just like how how organized how clean the code is things like that um so the resources are at the bottom of this page this is published somewhere on a global site as well and we actually do have our lead API engineer with us at the booth which is amazing it's first time he's here so if you have like specific technical questions or anything you want to help with or more inquiries stop by and he's like around to help with all of that which is amazing so yeah I think what else did I put in this presentation let me just see if I'm at the end um one second yeah that's basically it so if you have any questions I can take those now um that link I think is just going to take you back to the website again so you can follow everything I just said and yeah I'm happy to chat you can also come up here if you don't want to like say it loudly but thanks thanks for joining