Q1 2023 Product Update

TL;DR

This quarter at Covalent we shipped:

1. Premium API - Our Premium API tier went live to the public, bringing higher rate limits and API improvements to users starting at $50 monthly.

2. Class C - You can now get deeper access to top protocols like Aave, Curve, Balancer and others with our new class of endpoints called Class C.

3. Transactions v3 - We updated our suite of transactions endpoints, releasing new and faster versions with added capabilities including better pagination. Get all transactions by address or by block with decoded logs.

4. Balances v3 - Our number one endpoint, Get token balances for address, was made faster for the Premium API tier on Ethereum and BSC and Polygon. Easily get all (ERC20, ERC721, ERC1155, and native) token balances for an address.

5. 30+ new blockchains - You can now make any Class A query on over 30 new indexed blockchains! See details below.

6. NFT endpoints - We released a new and improved suite of NFT endpoints allowing you to get data on traits, attributes, ownership and more.

7. Event logs - You can now get all the event logs of the latest block, or for a range of blocks, Including sender contract metadata as well as decoded logs.

8. ETHDenver - We attended and sponsored the biggest annual developer conference in Denver, receiving 20 amazing project submissions and awarding $10K in prizes.

Introduction

Q1 of 2023 has started with a bang, with multiple initiatives that the Covalent team has worked on for months being released. In total, we shipped 51 new endpoints this quarter! Overall, the upgrades to our existing endpoints and new product launches have given our API a strong position in the market, which we only expect to grow. Additionally, the rate of new chains indexed has skyrocketed, bringing our ecosystem to over 100 blockchains fully supported at the end of this quarter. Keep reading to dive deeper into each product update.

Please note, What’s Next is subject to change based on consumer demand, user feedback, unknown unknowns and market conditions. These are goals we are actively working towards, but priorities can shift based on what is best for the company and our overall vision.

Premium API

Toward the end of 2022, we began beta-testing our Premium API tier - a tier supporting higher rate and volume limits on select endpoints. In January of 2023, we released this tier publicly, allowing anyone to sign up and scale their project with us. Initially, the Premium API tier went live with Get token balances for address as the primary enhanced endpoint, supporting 50 RPS on Ethereum. Since then, we’ve added several other endpoints to this tier, including Get transactions for address. These significant product improvements have allowed the biggest applications built on Covalent to support thousands of users. Learn more about our pricing here.

What Shipped:

• The Covalent Premium API tier starts at $50/month for 50RPS and 100,000 credits to use toward API calls. Only the following endpoints count against your monthly credit allocation:

  • Get token balances for address on Ethereum, Polygon and BSC.

  • Get a transaction on all chains.

  • Transactions V3 endpoints on all chains except BSC.

What's Next:

• We are expanding the Premium API tier to include more enhanced endpoints and support for more chains on the current Premium endpoints.

Class C

Users have grown to love our unified API and structured data, being able to make the same request on any supported chain and quickly take applications to new ecosystems. Some protocols, however, are not one-size-fits-all. We heard the demand for a more customized class of endpoints, allowing you to dig deeper into DeFi. Class C endpoints do just that -give you access to specific lending, borrowing and yield farming data on protocols that don’t copy the constant product AMM that our xy=k endpoints cover.

What Shipped:

• Easily integrate balances, transactions and market data from the following top protocols into any application:

  • aave

  • balancer

  • bitcoin

  • compound

  • curve

  • dodo

  • frax

  • instadapp

  • lido

  • yearn

What's Next:

• Next, we are building Class C endpoints for Uniswap v3 and its derivatives.

• In Q2, we’re focusing on bringing Class C to the public. We’ve developed a way to save custom SQL queries as endpoints, and now we are building the UI to create a fair, high-quality marketplace for developers to create and share their Class C endpoints.

Transactions v3

Since its inception, Covalent’s Get transactions for address endpoint has been unique in the industry. Rather than struggle to piece together account activity by making multiple RPCs using a list of the transaction hashes, Covalent returns all transactions and decoded logs with a simple API call. However, this endpoint was initially built for the single-user address use case, not the bulk data fetch applications require today. That’s why we released a new suite of transactions endpoints, v3, that offers more flexibility dependent on different use cases.

What Shipped:

• Transactions v3 includes the following set of new endpoints. Recent transactions are ideal for the wallet use case, where users want to see a page of their recent activity. In contrast, paginated transactions are suitable for the taxation use case, where companies may need to search through hundreds of thousands of taxable events on behalf of their clients. With transactions in a block, easily create notifications for interesting wallets or events.

  • Get recent transactions for address (v3).

  • Get paginated transactions for address (v3).

  • Get all transactions in a block (v3).

  • Get all transactions in a block by page (v3).

  • Get bulk time bucket transactions for address (v3).

What's Next:

• In Q2 we are extending our efforts into transaction labelling. This includes adding more contextual DEX and NFT details to our transactions endpoints.

Balances v3

Our most popular endpoint, Get token balances for address, also received an upgrade this quarter, now at least 10x faster and more reliable in response time no matter the size of the address. For context, when load testing this new endpoint with around 50M API calls, 95% of calls were completed in 100ms (without NFTs). When we included NFT assets, 95% of calls were completed in under 2 seconds.

This endpoint allows you to get all ERC20, ERC721, ERC1155 and native token balances for a given address.

What Shipped:

• Get token balances for address (v3) on Ethereum, Polygon and BSC.

• Additionally, we now offer balances at up to 50 requests per second on Ethereum, Polygon and Binance in our Premium API tier.

• As a special mention, we added Bitcoin support to this endpoint too! This is significant because where Bitcoin transactions is a separate Class C endpoint due to the chain’s architecture, we were able to bring balances into our unified schema.

What's Next:

• A new token holders endpoint will be released shortly, supporting ERC20, ERC721, and ERC1155 tokens. This endpoint will have the same parameters as the original one we deprecated, apart from page-size, which is fixed at 100. Users can fetch historical token holders with the parameter block-height.

• We are expanding balances v3 to support more blockchains at up to 50 requests per second.

30+ New Blockchains

This year, our indexing rate is faster than ever, with 30+ chains added in just three months. Build in any of these new ecosystems using our Class A endpoints. Covalent supports the broader multi-chain ecosystem, starting at the Layer 1 roots and expanding our indexing services to Layer 2s and appchains.

What Shipped:

TABLERECORD

What's Next:

• We continue to index new chains rapidly, extending our coverage in appchain ecosystems like Polygon Supernets, Avalanche Subnets, and SKALE appchains.

NFT Endpoints

With so much growth in the NFT sector, we saw fit to expose better pathways to this data with NFT transactions, traits, attributes, ownership and more. With high-quality NFT data, we can better support our existing clients and many new and exciting use cases.

What Shipped:

• We released a new suite of NFT endpoints offering:

  • Get NFTs for address.

  • Get NFT token IDs for contract with metadata.

  • Get NFT transactions for contract.

  • Get Traits for a collection.

  • Get Attributes for a collection trait.

  • Get Trait Summary for collection.

  • Check ownership in NFT collection.

  • Check ownership in NFT collection for specific token.

• Additionally, we are caching all NFTs and their metadata on major blockchains to improve the speed and accuracy of our API, eliminating time-outs from upstream servers. You can monitor the progress of this initiative on the NFT coverage section of our docs.

What's Next:

• We are re-releasing NFT market data endpoints soon. Some users may remember we offered market data endpoints before that returned NFT collection floor prices and historical sales data. These endpoints were deprecated, but after a makeover, they are coming back! With our database, we are uniquely positioned to offer aggregate market data across chains in a single API call -a feature that many customers appreciate.

• We continue our caching process on Ethereum, Polygon and BSC before moving to cache other chains.

Event Logs

In the Base section of our Class A endpoints, users could always query log events by contract address and topic hash. In Q1, however, we released a new endpoint that offers even more flexibility when getting event logs data.

What Shipped:

• We released the Get Logs endpoint, which is almost like eth_getLogs, but better. Not only does it include all transactions and their events data within a block, but you can also specify a range of blocks and do custom filtering with topic hashes. All transaction items return the sender contract metadata and decoded log information, which means you can immediately see the transaction logs and know what they’re about.

ETHDenver

The Covalent team returned to Denver this year for ETHDenver, the world’s largest and longest-running Ethereum #BUIDLathon event. We had the opportunity to be Cypher sponsors this year, offering a $10K bounty to teams building with the Covalent API. This event is important because we connect in person with our community of builders and understand how we can help them. Many insightful conversations were had at our booth, some of which have already led to the development of new features. As for the hackathon, this year, we had the opportunity to evaluate 20 excellent submissions covering a large spectrum of web3 use cases, including:

• Multi-chain wallets with multiple web2 integrations.

• Smart contract enhancements using Zero Knowledge Machine Learning models.

• Note-taking app (like Notion) extensions with blockchain data feeds.

• Crypto financial planning and privacy tools.

We were pleased to award $1000 to each of the winning teams. Read our wrap-up blog post here to learn more about each project in depth.

Conclusion

Despite the challenges the current bear market presents, the Covalent team remains committed to supporting the builders of tomorrow. We believe that the next wave of blockchain innovation will come from those working tirelessly to create novel applications and products that push the limits of what's possible in the space. As such, we are dedicated to providing the infrastructure and tools necessary to help these builders bring their ideas to life.

Our product updates this quarter reflect this commitment, as we have continued to enhance our API and add support for more blockchains, making it easier for developers to access and analyze data across multiple networks.

Looking forward, we remain focused on championing the builders of tomorrow and providing the support they need to succeed in the ever-evolving blockchain landscape. We will continue to work closely with our community to identify new opportunities and develop innovative solutions that empower builders to create the next generation of decentralized applications. Thank you for your continued support of Covalent; we couldn’t grow without such fantastic users. Together, we will usher in a new era of blockchain innovation.