Covalent 🛠 Build in Web3 with One Unified API - Leilani Ledingham

foreign [Applause] [Music] so hi my name is Leilani I'm a product manager at covalent and I'm going to tell you how to build in web3 using our unified API so today kind of the topics that we'll cover are a little bit of the current data challenges because there are multiple ways to pull data from the blockchain and it kind of depends on your use case but I think there's definitely some common challenges that everyone's trying to solve what is covalent the unified API how to actually access on-chain data for some of your builds and then just a bunch of resources and our Bounty and demos and just like a whole bunch of stuff to get you started basically um so at covalent we tend to think about the next couple years of the blockchain ecosystem what it's all going to look like particularly how this is all going to scale especially when it comes to data so right now there's a host of different applications multiple blockchains and producing soon I think we're going to start seeing use cases like Health Data government data a lot more privacy blockchains and in some cases a lot of applications where you might not even know that it's on chain and at that point things require a lot of interoperability if you've kind of interacted in this space or you have different wallets or you build applications on different chains you might already realize some of the frictions and the challenges that happen when you try to do that and especially when it comes to extracting data which is what we focus on it's all like kind of messy and it's in different formats so we think that's a big problem to solve uh so if you have ran your own notes before maybe or built your own transformation engines some of this stuff can be one like pretty time consuming complicated uh dating can be missing and delayed we experience that on a daily basis even as like a decent sized company it's challenging and then there's the question whether to build or buy so this can be an individual level if you're going to pay for like monthly plans for different services or at a company level where you have a use case uh that maybe you want to build your own indexer but you realize that can take like you know six months to a year or something to do it properly so lots of challenges and data that leads us to what is covalent um basically we are a solution to access all on-chain data and we do this currently across unofficially 50 different blockchains officially 40. uh but if you want any of the like hidden chain IDs you can just ask me afterwards so what it is is a single API a unified API which basically means that you can use the same tool but just change parameters to switch from chain to chain it's variable from the cloud you actually don't really need to be a developer to use it once I show you the docs and how we've kind of set it up it's pretty user friendly you can try it live and you can pull it in analyst mode which means you get a CSV or like a spreadsheet that you can put into tools like Tableau or power bi if you are an analyst or if you're looking at building something that requires analytics maybe for this hackathon uh and the best thing about this API is that you can pretty much build a multi-chain application in minutes because all you have to do is change that one parameter so types of use cases with covalent today basically we crawl all the small smart contracts on every single blockchain that we index so we fully index the current and historical data which means that the types of use cases are pretty endless you can just kind of use any on-chain data that you want you just have to know how to get it so we have quite a few out of the box endpoints for things like token balances transactions historical transactions nfts but you can always go through the log events and you can get a little more granular and we also have different developer tools like primer that you could use to like specify your queries even more but we see a lot of like D5 dashboards nft galleries crypto wallets some Dow tools so if you are like maybe not decided on what you're building equivalence always a pretty good bet because you know that you'll be able to get some data for your project I don't know if that's the use case or if people already have an idea but just thought I mention it so how does it work basically um we're kind of this data layer in between blockchains and nodes and then the actual applications that people are using so for developers you don't always need to interact directly with the blockchain or a read-only API so basically any data that you want to pull into your project you don't need to necessarily be running your own nodes or paying for that to do it you can just use our free API to pull all of that easily into your project and then support your applications so the data layer we think is pretty essential to the crypto stack it's also something that helps everyone scale because you can build applications faster basically and easier so that's the goal and yeah we see this supporting a lot more users on chain and a lot more applications that are interoperable as well because if you've built your own kind of transformation engines in the past then you either need to build that whole thing again for a different chain or you need to make changes maybe in the in the pipeline that cause you to like reload all of that data and with us as instant so it's a lot easier to kind of be creative make some quick changes and build something different so this is how it works basically we run indexing nodes that take in all the data from different blockchains here's like a selection of some of them but I'll show you our API reference which shows you all the supported networks and then we basically format them into a couple different classes of endpoints so the most popular is Class A and points those are basically just queries that you can make on any single chain that's supported so questions like get token balances for this address it returns all the balances for that address instead of querying it like token by token it allows you to do your taxes you can pull like nft data you can pull nft metadata so you can show up the images and the video URLs and all of that stuff and then we have class B endpoints I'll go into these like in the dock so you can actually see it um but claspbian points are basically protocol specific so we have one Suite which is really popular which is for Dex data so basically most decentralized exchanges or a lot of them are clones of uniswap uh so like Spirit swap Stella swap pancake Swap all of the swaps you can pull through those endpoints you just have to change the deck's name in your query and then we have something really exciting which is actually testing internally right now but we're bringing a couple people on that are interested in this uh to basically go through this process of building their own endpoints so we realized our limitations with having these kind of like out of the box easy to use endpoints was that sometimes it's hard for people to make specific queries or support specific use cases or just access the data that we have but it's not packaged so Class C is going to be solving that building those through SQL and then saving your own endpoints and that's going to launch pretty soon but it's working so if anyone's really interested and has like a burning use case talk to me afterwards um yeah here's like some of our users uh currently over 40 000 developers which is a pretty big chunk of the ones in this space I think all of those are active but that's like the history to date um and yeah we're powering a lot of wallet applications some tax use cases currently some like web 2 companies that are more interested in adding crypto features to their project so it's pretty cool and then yeah basically support 50 blockchains again you won't see every single one of those on the reference because some of them aren't qaed but you can unofficially support them if we haven't done a marketing launch we had a hackathon guy from like East New York that built his whole project on a chain that wasn't exposed but he knew that we supported it so if you know the ID then you're all good um okay so here's the Bounty information we're offering five thousand dollars um for any projects that integrate the API in a meaningful way so basically we judge that on three points one is like the feasibility or the quality of your use case if it's actually like you know new and solving something for somebody and it's interesting uh and then two is the like complexity of the endpoints you use so how many um the way that you integrate covalent how much basically instead of just like copy paste although you can use our code templates and copy paste you just want to make some like stylistic changes maybe um and then three is just like the overall quality of the project so things like design often stick out and stuff like that so some ideas and I'll show you some past examples as well because I think we have lots of time um nft store friends are great on-chain analytics really easy with covalent uh wallets are always an easy use case um anything tax related you can get historical transactions and we do have a pretty new way to like crawl historical transactions if you're looking at doing that at scale across any different chain um so I can walk you through that as well myself and my colleague Kia who's here in the back are going to be just walking around all day tomorrow we're not at a booth but we'll like show where we are in case you want to find us uh okay so I'm going to open up the links there's basically three primary resources one is our knowledge base so that has things like tutorials how-to guides um example projects from past hackathons so you can get like inspiration from that as well as just like General API info and the second is our API reference that's where you can actually try all the endpoints live and see what the response looks like and then three is our code template section so we have a repo on GitHub now that has a bunch of different components codologs or anything that you can basically like fork and make some changes to so it's an easy way to get started on a build as well um I think I'm gonna yeah basically go into those now so here is our knowledge base so this is the first link the API docs when you first go to it yeah okay it looks normal in here um so you get to this from our website covalenthq.com docs uh and then you'll land on like the overview here so it's going to tell you everything that I just did um but you can also scroll further down see some of our launch updates our chain supported networks and this is probably the most relevant section so developer tools you can go into some of the examples how to use websocket connections for like notifications from log events um you can enable covalent and Postman if you're familiar with working with that environment you can learn about primer which is how to like further specify your queries or you can just go into any of the supported networks and learn a little bit more about those blockchains so you can also go to the API reference from here which is that second link where you can actually try the endpoints live so I kind of did it before just because I always get really paranoid about Wi-Fi these things but here's the class A endpoints so the categories here we kind of just bucketed them into common use cases so balances like token balances if you want any sort of uh wallet use case and you need erc20 transfers um change in token holders anything like that it's imbalances and then nft use case you can pull in again like all of the assets and the metadata that you need uh to build cool things um that was General uh transactions so you can get a transaction and get really detailed logs or you can get transactions for address and get all of the transactions for that address and then base so like at a block get all the chains that we support for instance this will give you all the chain IDs these are just kind of like your building blocks for anything you want to do and then for those Dex endpoints that I mentioned um here's a whole bunch of them so you can get all of the liquidity pools uh all of the uh yeah basically all of the like Dex data that you might need token pairs their prices all of that um yeah so this is kind of like a sample response of what balances will give you again I mentioned you put in a wallet address and it just gives you all of the different tokens uh that is held in that address and it'll give you some with a balance of zero as well because we built this basically like a bank account so if you've ever had that asset it shows up you might not have it right now but it'll just give you everything um because it's like a small window I just pulled open the Json and what you would get here but basically you just get uh all the tokens which is a really efficient way to call it and then now moving on to our web3 resources um so this is our web3 resources pack I think I have a QR code on this next slide afterwards when I go back so it's easier to find the link but again just feel free to ask me anytime uh also if you like this would love it if you start it but basically this has uh our templates so you can make like a DEX dashboard you can use all of that code and you can stylize it you can make price trackers you can make a mobile app we have code along videos so depends kind of on your level or if you're a beginner these can be really really helpful or if you're referring people into blockchain it's also a good resource and then we also have an integration with third web who are some great partners of ours too and this will link you to the web3 components Library so more things that you can use so basically we have a token balances component a token transfers and then a token holders so these are what they look like basically it works with ens as well which is always what I do because I hate copying addresses so you can just put in like demo.eath for example or whatever your ens name and it'll show you all of your balances as well as the logos the type of the currency the contract address so pretty much build a wallet pretty easily out of that alone and then you can integrate the erc20 transfers that that address has had and also like the token holders for each of those different tokens um yeah so where are we I think whoops there we go oh past submissions um so while we have time just because I thought it was cool we do a lot of Youth Global hackathons uh and sometimes I think it's cool to Showcase what people have built or give others ideas so these are a couple ones from East New York um which was a really great hackathon so they'll just show you some like example projects this one's called Dow Dash so they basically used like our log events endpoint I went through to get really detailed Dao information to see how much people are participating in uh the governance votes for instance and based on that and based on people's on-chain involvement in a dow they could like grow these little trees and grow these little people so it's like kind of like a Tamagotchi but for Dao participation which I thought was really cute uh this one's Brent nft loved the name on this one it's awkward if these people are here and I'm like shouting out their projects but this one basically allowed you to lend an nft um so sometimes events uh are like token gated for instance or there's other perks that you get by being a holder but you might not want to buy that uh specific nft or it might cost you know like a hundred thousand dollars so what you can do is actually like rent them uh this was an integration using our data to display all the front end and then with gnosis as well uh where you could basically yeah like rent it for 24 hours get into whatever you want to do and then give it back which I thought was cool uh block stories was a really good kind of like uh front end overlay with our data so there's a big problem of like human readable data in blockchain a lot of it's just really confusing the terminology is quite a steep learning curve um so block stories built this using our transactions endpoint where you could go in uh basically like open source add information to a transaction to make that a little bit more meaningful on the chains you could go and search and find that this person sold this to this person and it's written in like words you can see the most traded Punk for instance or other things like that I'm kind of doing them a disservice by like describing it all very slowly but just thought it was cool and then this one this was awesome this was actually an East New York finalist um oh WiFi there we go so uh they basically built like a simulator that you could add to metamask that would show you whether or not a transaction was fraudulent or dangerous uh which is also a pretty big problem because blockchain transactions are super permanent so you can send money to a burnt address for instance and never get it back so safe node basically you just attach it to metamask it simulates the transaction shows you like dangerous addresses that might have interacted with mixers before or anything like that so they used our data to simulate that um I can always go through like other submissions if you want to find me tomorrow but that's our developer resources um hopefully the QR code is big enough I'll also realize I'm not full screen so there we go so that'll take you to um the GitHub library that has all of those components and stuff but from there there's also links to the website um I'll leave it for like a couple more seconds and then thank you that's all if you have any questions let me know or find me walking around afterwards [Applause]