Introduction

The Covalent Network represents the progressive decentralization of Covalent towards a community-owned and community-run protocol.

A multi-sided platform designed to eventually be self-sufficient, the Covalent Network works by capturing and indexing blockchain data and storing it across multiple points on the network. Anyone can then access this data instantly through querying the GoldRush API (formerly known as the Unified API).

The Covalent Network has the following capabilities:

• Compatible with industry standard data tools
• Multi-chain compatible
• Storage efficient
• Network efficient
• Low resource requirements to run on commercial / retail infrastructure

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Building for Ethereum’s Long-term Data Availability

Covalent defines long-term data availability as the sustained accessibility and availability of historical data on a blockchain network over extended periods of time. While Ethereum’s historical data has always been available directly through the client, this is changing.

Due to Ethereum adopting rollups as well as other protocol improvements like Danksharding (data blobs required for validation are deleted after 18 days) and state expiry (EIP-4444), the responsibility of providing historical data moves outside the Ethereum core protocol.

The Covalent Network assumes the responsibility of ensuring long-term data availability. It achieves this by offering a decentralized, cryptographically secure data availability network that allows developers to access comprehensive historical and real-time data for Ethereum as well as other base layers. By leveraging innovative technologies such as the open-sourced Block Specimens & Block Results the Covalent Network empowers anyone to build a full canonical representation of a blockchain, host a database with a standardized schema, or seamlessly query data via the GoldRush API (formerly known as the Unified API).

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A Network Built on Data Verifiability

At the core of the Covalent Network is data verifiability which is achieved by employing cryptographic proofs. For every piece of work or transformation completed on the Covalent Network, a respective proof is created ensuring that Network Operators behave honestly and provide data that is accurate.

The Covalent Network is one of the first data middleware protocols to employ a proof-based system to ensure data verifiability. This is not only a novel feature of the Covalent Network but an essential mechanism in rebuilding the new foundations of the web.

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Built for Modularity and Extensibility

The Covalent Network decouples the data storage layer of blockchains via “Block Specimens” - a novel, canonical data storage format that together represents the blockchain state. Further downstream enrichment of blockchain data like tracing and execution can be (re-)run on Block Specimens without the need of running a resource-heavy node.

Furthermore, the standard data model exposed by the block specimen drives composability and jump-starts innovation when anyone can remix, fork and wrap data just like any other asset.