Accessing Multi Chain Data with One Unified API - Leilani Ledingham

hi everyone thanks for coming um i'm lay well leilani but you can call me lay i'm with covalent um if anyone's heard of us you might have seen me or been in discord with me we do a whole bunch of hackathons we are a free api for blockchain data so if you are unfamiliar i'm actually going to walk through a little bit of what we do today and then how you can access it as well and actually demo some of our some of our docs and the api requests that you can make so yeah let's get into it so here i'm going to start off a little bit i think we have 20 minutes about the web 3 data trends and challenges that we've seen so being an infrastructure provider and participating in a lot of hackathons is a great way to actually see what's like up and coming and what a lot of developers are building and where we can actually provide data for that space and then a little bit about the covalent api itself how to access on-chain data and resources and demos so first i think it's pretty clear if you're here uh crypto has had a pretty massive year and adoption's definitely on the upswing so something that we notice that covalent is this intersection between fintech and crypto merging and those big companies getting involved in the space and with that comes a big need for data and it's not always the most accessible thing to actually extract data from the blockchain especially for people that are just checking it out for the first time and don't really know how to run a node for instance or host their own infrastructure we also seen a big nft boom uh huge brands getting into the space like i guess most recently in adidas and some of those that make headlines and with that there's also quite a few data challenges around nfts so mostly uh you're able to find that info on things like openc which we saw couldn't always be reliable no hate to open see i love them but yeah nft booms and government initiatives so it's getting more and more legitimate kind of by the day to actually adopt crypto and uh with that we're definitely not anywhere near the resources to support i think what we'd call mainstream adoption and part of that is the lack of like a really solid infrastructure layer so just on the right there's a little graph of the kind of uh adoption curve of some historical technologies like or not historical but big tech booms like cars and the internet and stuff and bitcoin is like on the far right on the bottom so we really do have a long way to go so at covalent we kind of like to think about what the next five ten years looks like um and we typically go with 2025 and so we sort of see millions and actually i think billions of critical information on blockchains not just financial by any means this can be like medical records supply chain info really anything that can be on-chain dozens of single-use and multi-use blockchains so we are really really believing in the multi-chain future and with that comes its own challenges because if you interact and defy a lot right now then you'll know that it can be quite a pain to like bridge your assets from one bridge to another one chain to another you don't have your information in one place so there's a lot of ways to go in terms of cooperation and then thousands of applications and nice screen and billions of users so um yeah basically we're working on a data layer that will be able to support uh like exponentially more people than we have right now because i know this seems like a busy conference but really back in the real world it doesn't feel like that many people actually know what we do so the two kind of major problems that come with i think scaling and working towards adoption is this data data interoperability challenge so basically that goes back to blockchains and applications being able to work together so you're not necessarily going to only interact with one chain most of you probably aren't already because gas fees are high on one thing we move to another and there's different chains for different purposes so with that you need to be able to transport your data transport your assets and just understand how to go between the different ecosystems the other challenge is just the amount of data that is on chain so it's really really difficult and actually complex to pull that out maybe some of you have experience with that but it doesn't stop after building a transformation engine you have to maintain it as well and especially with the rise of more non-evf chains uh it's quite a challenge to figure that whole system out i kind of like to use the analogy of grocery stores so like familiar with evm chains it's kind of like going into a grocery store chain that you already know you know where the general layout is you know where the labels are you know what food you're going to get but if you go to a different country that's like a non-evm chain it's built completely differently you don't necessarily know where to find things and that can be a challenge for indexing or for any applications that are built on those different chains so what is the covalent api i hope you enjoy my emojis in this presentation i had to make it a little bit visual so basically we're one solution to access all on-chain data so it's a single unified api what that means is we pull data and we run nodes across different blockchains currently 28 but you actually only have to use one api and you can change the parameters to switch in between so that main parameter that you switch between is called the chain id and basically that enables you to take your project across any of the different chains we support and we're queryable from the cloud it's a no code api we actually have an analyst mode as well which i'll go into a little bit more in depth in a second but really it's kind of the api for the multi-chain future so if you're building anything that you want to be interoperable or you want to transport across different protocols um i would check us out so where we fit in the crypto stack um the foundation layers of course the blockchains and then you have nodes so the means to access all of that data and actually be able to extract it and use it in meaningful ways but if you're a developer or if you're especially a new web 2 developer potentially coming into this space and you're focused on just creating the applications creating things to support the user base you don't necessarily want to be running your own nodes or taking on all of that extra cost yourself so covalent sits as kind of a middleware data layer in between the applications and extracting data so we take on the cost and then we basically just provide you the api that you can quickly focus on user applications like wallets nft galleries taxation tools we like to say one api one billion possibilities and that's how we support kind of scaling so our two main um user demographics are of course developers but within that there's a broad range so i think we've seen at this conference too we have some experienced people that have been developing in web3 for a really long time but we also have more and more people that are just graduating or maybe checking out blockchain data for the first time and yeah they want they want easy tools with tutorials and ways to quickly kind of understand the data set a little bit better and we also see a lot more analysts popping in so one feature that we recently added to our docs is an analyst mode so you can actually download all of the data from our api in a csv format as well so it's really useful for building sort of dashboards any analytics tools or just getting rapid insights into uh into the blockchain data so here's a couple of the projects that use us currently we have over 15 000 developers and about 500 plus projects using it it's actually really great to be able to see some of those people for the first time in person at this conference so if you work with us or if you're familiar definitely come up and say hi and if you have questions afterwards too we're right at the start of the second floor our booth is right there so i'm going to just mention a bit about our bounties just in case anybody is here building um because we're offering basically 25 000 both for virtual and in-person uh hacking so if you use any of our endpoints you're actually eligible to get some of these bounties and it ties into the broader tracks as well um so our number one is actually our nft api endpoints so nfts as i mentioned had a really big year um we actually hosted a nft workshop a couple days ago where you can use our api to battle out different metadata points and make fun little like pokemon-esque builds so i would check those out as well as our log events endpoints we have another bounty for and then a catch-all for anything else you want to use so i'm going to show you a couple of our resources actually um the first one is our covalent docs so this is our knowledge base this is something that we're focusing on a lot to build out tutorials how-to guides and recently we actually started launching more code templates so these are templates that our team builds that are really easy to just like fork and modify and build out yourself and then second is our api reference page which i'll demo a little bit for you but you can actually try everything directly in the browser so again if you're here hacking you can see exactly what those responses are going to look like and makes it really easy to get started and third if you're on replit is our our covalent replit where you can find even more of those templates not yet i'm going to demo those sorry okay so when you come to the docs it's basically going to look like this it's covalenthq.com and then you can see a couple of our developer tools over here just an overview of the api everything i just talked about and you can also find our support and networks here but i think what this is a really useful tool for is the project showcase so even if you're not a developer but you want to get a better idea of the space and what people are building and we kind of batch it into these different categories like dexes nfts analytics tools things like that and you can actually go through these and you can click on any topic you're interested in and see what some people have built in the past so we just like to keep a record of like cool hackathon projects and it's good for inspo that way and then if you go down to our supported networks i'm just going to click on ethereum because it's first but you can actually see more info on those networks how to interact with them and which endpoints are supported so that's going to lead you to our api page which you can go to which is covalenthq.com api but you can get there from the website easily you don't have to remember that url so when you prompt the page this is what it looks like and we've put a lot of effort into basically making this a really accessible page for anyone to use so it should be easy to understand even if you're not coming from a web 3 background and one thing to look at is the global settings bar so you can see all the different chains we support up here currently it's about 28 and then you can also format the response currency that you want to get your data response in and you could switch between those different modes up here as well um so i'm just going to go through what some of the endpoints look like basically we just added support for solana on our balances endpoint so if you go to any of the endpoints here you're going to see a little bit more information what the response looks like what the curl address looks like then you can actually click run which i did for this one oops it zoomed out sorry but then you're basically just going to be able to see what that response actually looks like directly in the docs this is also where you can download csv files too so if you click uh over here we batch our endpoints into class a class b and then coming soon we're actually going to be focused on class c which are community built endpoints so class a these apply across any of those different chains that we index and they're broadly kind of categorized into balances nfts transactions and then base end points so these are things like get a blog get block heights any of the log events again for those bounties these are what you'd be using and for nfts we actually recently added two new endpoints which are market global view and then you can drill down into a particular collection so the benefit of indexing all the chains in one place is that we can actually aggregate blockchain data to provide like volume weighted market caps of nft collections and things like that so i would definitely check these out on your own time too i'm probably not going to go through all of them but then yeah if you want to click any of these to try them live you can basically just click run right here i hope the wi-fi is good enough to do this yeah it is okay and then you can switch between this analyst and developer mode and you can see that you can get a spreadsheet like that which you can quickly input into your apps or if you're not building apps you can input those into tools like tableau power bi really anything you want so yeah um sorry i keep zooming the second class is class b and then these are protocol specific so these are just kind of some shortcuts for things like uni swap pancake swaps and different dexes that we support and then one i just want to highlight here are x y equals k so with x y equals k endpoints um a lot of different decentralized exchanges are forked off of the uniswap v2 framework so we can actually get data for pretty much all of those you can click through this list and see what's supported but you can also use the drop down here because they all have the same architecture we can actually get data in the exact same format for all of those different indexes so the y equals can points really really powerful for any sort of dex information that you're looking for and yeah i would recommend checking this out out for sure as well um yeah so i wanted to quickly show the replit as well these are some of our templates that you can use if you're hacking this weekend or if you just want to get started and see what they look like you can go to covalent replit and some things we have on here are the like an nft dashboard template where you can make your own custom collection dashboard we have a dex analytics template um a wallet dashboard so if you're really new to crypto or if you're in web 2 and you want to experiment with these tools this is also a good place to start replit is super user friendly but we're also moving more of these projects onto github as well and trying to make that experience as easy as possible so in general i think the trend of this is like faster better cheaper and making making this process easy for developers so if you're interested come check us out you can also ask us questions at our covalent booth yeah it's on the second floor right at the beginning and i know i'm a bit early but i guess we can ask a couple questions now that's good okay yeah thanks