We started working on Covalent over 4 years ago. Looking back, we’ve never wavered in our resolve to build the best approach to understanding blockchain data. It’s gratifying to see the market starting to understand and appreciate our unique approach and philosophy. Here's a letter I shared with our stakeholders highlighting the key moments that defined Covalent over the last twelve months.
Hey guys,
Ganesh from Covalent here. 👋
We are well on our way into 2022, and the Covalent team wishes everyone a wonderful new year! Thank you all for your continued support.
2021 was the biggest year yet for Covalent. We closed a $10 million dollar public sale on Coinlist, grew our traction by orders of magnitude and rapidly expanded our team to take on the challenge of blockchain data visibility with the Unified API.
It’s day one for Covalent and we are doubling down on our bold execution in 2022. We stand by our core values F.O.U.R - First principles thinking, Ownership, Urgency and Relentlessness. Covalent has scaled from a small project with two passionate founders to a project with global ambitions – we attribute our success to these core values.
Below are a few highlights from the past year.
Covalent's growth in 2021
1. 55 Team Members
We continued our hypergrowth into 2021. We grew our headcount to 55 team members. We've managed to assemble a stellar team of network architects, software engineers, product managers, marketers and data scientists to build out Covalent. For context, in July of 2020, we were just two co-founders.
2. 15,000+ Developers
2021 is the year we made massive in-roads with developers using the Unified API. We started the year with just 500 developers - we ended the year with over 15,000 developers. These developers are building the next generation of blockchain consumer and enterprise applications including marquee names like Rainbow Wallet, XDeFi, Bitski, Paraswap, Prysm, Zerion, Rotki and hundreds of exciting projects.
3. Mature API stack for 26 blockchains
2021 also saw the introduction of Class A and Class B endpoints. The Unified API enables a diverse set of use-cases, many of them new and never seen before and it was important to educate new developers on what you could do with the API. Developers love having One Unified API to access all of the data on all of the 26 supported blockchains!
To put this in context, Covalent only supported one blockchain (Ethereum) at the end of 2020.
4. Capturing Mindshare
Covalent sponsored 20 hackathons in 2021. The hackathons include a mix of our flagship hackathons like One Million Wallets as well as on platforms such as EthGlobal.
Our team also spoke at multiple events every month - sometimes even two a day. Take a look at our resources page for a curated list.
5. Community Growth
2021 was the introduction of the Alchemist program - our community growth and leadership program. Over the course of six seasons, we grew this community to over 2500 Alchemists who are now data savy and ready to take on the Web3 world.
Stay tuned for for the launch of the Alchemist 3.0 program soon. ✨
6. $CQT and Governance
The Covalent Query Token is the governance and staking token that powers the Covalent Network. In 2021, our community executed two governance proposal start to finish:
In addition, $CQT is now listed on Kraken, Crypto.com, FTX, AscendEX and ofcourse the usual DEXes like Uniswap and Sushi.
Looking ahead
For 2022, we are looking to build on the momentum and continue on our mission of bringing complete visiblity to blockchain data. Here's what to expect:
Covalent Network launch - we’ve been heads down building the decentralized Covalent Network over the past two years. Code has been written, 10 professional validators have been recruited, security audits are complete, and we are going to open-sourcing our code / whitepapers to great fanfare in January/February. This network design is one of a kind in the blockchain space and a testnet version is being battle tested as we speak. Target staking percentage is 30% of circulating supply and an estimated APR of 10-15% in line with industry standards.
More blockchain indexing - We will continue to add new blockchains to our roster of indexed blockchains. 2022 will also see our foray into non-EVM chain indexing.
CQT on other blockchains - We will be taking CQT to other blockchains like Polygon, Avalanche, Fantom, Arbitrum and others in the new year.
Covalent Roadshow - Can you believe that we haven’t met face-to-face with a single supporter of ours in the last two years? This is going to change in 2022. Our team is going to be on the road every month in 2022 - please see the “Crossing Paths” section below and hola at us if you’re going to be there.
Product Robustness - A major focus for us in the new year is to get the API robust and polished enough to be ready for the new cohort of Web3 developers. We’ve had to turn away Fortune 50 enterprises from using the API because of scaling issues. The scale and magnitude of these new customers with their existing user bases of tens of millions of users will be much bigger than existing Web3-native projects. Each new customer we on-board will be a step-wise increase in API usage and therefore network protocol revenue.
Product Release Doctrine - Our promise to developers is that we are going to release a brand new product 🅴🆅🅴🆁🆈 . 🆂🅸🅽🅶🅻🅴 . 🅼🅾🅽🆃🅷. This is how we are going to eat the competition and break free from the market.
- In Nov 2021, we launched the industry’s best Blockchain API Reference docs with translations in 3 languages (Korean, Chinese and Russian).
- In Dec 2021, we launched the most powerful “XY=K” endpoint which is a single unified endpoint that works across all DEXes on dozens of blockchains.
Crossing Paths
We are going to be at the following events in Q1 2022, will we cross paths?
- Feb 11, 2022 - EthDenver
- Mar 30, 2022 - EthBarcelona
- Apr 2022 - EthWeek - Amsterdam
- May 2022 - Token 2049 - Singapore
- May 2022 - Permissionless - Florida
We welcome you to join our mailing list or directly reach out to me.
Much love, Ganesh Swami Co-Founder and CEO, Covalent