RockTree & Covalent Space Review: Engine Driving Multi-Domain Data Innovation

On June 25th, Rocktree jointly hosted a Space with Covalent on the theme of "How to Use Covalent's Billions of Data Points to Drive AI Growth," with Mandy from Odaily Planet Daily as the host. Odaily Planet Daily shared Covalent's recent milestones and the joining of industry experts, taking everyone into Covalent's data home.

The following interview content is compiled and organized by Odaily Planet Daily.

Odaily Planet Daily: Can you give a brief introduction of Covalent? Covalent has achieved 100 billion on-chain transaction parsing to ensure the integrity and verifiable long-term data availability for artificial intelligence. How do we guard against bias and data manipulation in AI models? What key role does Covalent play in Web3+AI?

**Ganesh swami：**Covalent is the home for Web3 data. More specifically, Covalent is the largest indexer in the Web3 space. "Indexing" refers to fetching blockchain data, structuring it, and storing it in a way that is easily accessible in the future.

Covalent currently indexes approximately 225 blockchains, providing this data to developers through APIs and to analysts through our Increment (dashboard/analytics) and GoldRush (blockchain explorer toolkit) products. All of these are free value-added products, with revenue flowing back to the Covalent network - stakers and node operators who maintain these decentralized indexing operations.

The data generated by blockchain transactions or any other network protocols is essentially 'unstructured', which means that additional steps are required to clean, organize, and categorize this data to make it more accessible, readable, and usable for developers and end users. This is the meaning of 'indexing'.

If you consider the current structure of the Internet (Web2), a few protocols define the way information is transmitted, stored, and secured. Then, a few major Web2 giants (such as Google or Baidu) have the infrastructure to facilitate this Internet, and make data more accessible through search engines, developer APIs, large-scale AI models, and other means.

The Covalent network structures and protects Web3 data in a decentralized manner to achieve similar results. You can think of it as an encrypted secure data pipeline, connecting unstructured receipts of all transactions from over 230 blockchains and any databases you want. At every step, operators on the Covalent network ensure the source and quality of the data, and prove their work by signing it. If this work is deemed invalid by challengers, they will lose funds because only staking CQT tokens can work for the network. Therefore, all of these activities are coordinated and incentivized by CQT tokens, resulting in the largest structured long-term data reserves in Web3. This enables a wide range of innovations and industry applications as they now rely on high-quality indexed data.

AI models are extremely sensitive to their input (training data). The data must be cleaned and structured into the appropriate format in advance, and the model requires a large amount of data. This is why Covalent has become popular among developers building AI and encryption applications.

Odaily Planet Daily: Covalent has made significant progress in the first and second quarters of 2024. Can you share these developments with everyone? What are the important milestones for CQT in the third quarter?

**Ganesh swami：**In the first half of this year, Covalent has achieved a lot.

We have launched the GoldRush Kit, which is a modular block explorer toolkit that anyone can use on any on-chain indexed by Covalent to create their own block explorer and customize UI components.

We continue to serve thousands of clients, including some major Wall Street and Financial Institutions, such as Fidelity and Ernst & Young (EY), as well as encryption-native groups such as Consensys and Rainbow Wallet, who access and utilize our data to drive insights and innovation in their businesses, accessing 59 TB of data from 8.8 billion transactions on the Covalent network since its inception.

We will transfer the previous off-chain demand-side revenue to on-chain through our community staking reward distribution system and our token buyback plan. This plan is an ongoing one and we will gradually implement it in 2024 and 2025 to help control supply and create a network flywheel that makes fiat currency revenue meaningfully support the network.

We have made significant improvements to Covalent's unified API, and have the most powerful and easiest single way to create useful data inputs for innovators and builders.

We are launching on the QuickNode market and announcing cooperation with Infura/Microsoft/Tencent in the decentralized infrastructure network (DIN), bringing together major participants to advance the DePIN industry as a whole.

We have successfully migrated the staking contract from Moonbeam to Ethereum, greatly simplifying the staking/delegation process for network participants, eliminating bridge-related risks, and increasing the participation rate of staking supply from 11% to nearly 20%.

Through this migration, we have introduced new node operators Thunderhead, Corthos Capital, and Restake, and there is also a potential team of operators that will join in the coming weeks.

We announce partnerships with Cronos zkEVM, Celo, Gnosis Chain, Movement, MELD, Taiko, Optimism, Berachain, Sei EVM, OKX's X 1, Blast, Xai, ApeChain, and many other projects.

Arthur Hayes has joined us as an advisor to accelerate our global rise.

We also launched the ecosystem airdrop program, starting from Wormhole, and just announced cooperation with Taiko and zkSync. There will be more airdrops for CQT stakers this year. This is a huge step forward as we have many ecosystem partners also going live.

We support 230 long wallets on more than 3 billion chains, all supported by Covalent data, which is a huge metric and achievement.

Looking ahead to the remaining time of this year, we have many things to look forward to:

• We have just previewed the new Covalent vision and look forward to a comprehensive release soon, so please follow our X account and community updates.
• We will soon launch Covalent's Ethereum Time Machine (EWM). This will leverage the Covalent network to build a long-term data availability solution to address the current shortcomings of other DA projects in the market, which only maintain 14-18 days of blockchain data! We are truly becoming the primary resource for all Web3, and the data rise is unstoppable.
• We will decentralize the query node component of the Covalent network and introduce multiple new operators (for all roles) - this means a wider community has more ways to participate in the network.
• We will collaborate deeply at the intersection of Web3 and AI, working with many projects that use Covalent for AI training and high-quality algorithms.
• We will launch the New Dawn program, which is one of our largest and most ambitious initiatives this year, including many growth plans and methods to make the network more autonomous.
• We will expand liquidity across multiple platforms (CeFi and DeFi) and regions to support the growth of the community and bring access to the network.
• We are very pleased to see further growth in our core team. Recently, we have strengthened our marketing department by recruiting three new employees, including a head focused on the Asia-Pacific region, in order to expand by 2024.
• In terms of marketing, we have utilized a multi-regional strategic approach through community building, product adoption, and increased influence. We understand how crucial localization can be, and we are very excited about the Chinese market and the broader Asian market. People truly understand cryptocurrency and appreciate its immense value and technological power, so we have created local language communities for each region.
• We have introduced a new batch of strategic investors for Covalent, and we will announce the new list of investors in the third quarter.
• We will continue to announce more chain and dApp partnerships as always.

Odaily Daily: BitMEX's co-founder and former CEO Arthur Hayes recently announced his joining Covalent as a strategic advisor. Congratulations. How will Arthur Hayes support the development of Covalent? Why did Arthur Hayes choose Covalent?

**Ganesh swami：**Covalent has worked on its first AI project with his company, but not its first DeFi project. He knows us very well and understands our history and real-time data. This enables him to provide more specific and effective advice for us.

Arthur is one of the most articulate voices in the Web3 space, and he has a large following who subscribe to his insights. Covalent will benefit from this.

He has rich experience and amazing achievements in the field of cryptocurrency, and has extensive resources to open doors that were previously inaccessible to projects and start the expansion into new fields.

Covalent is one of the first AI but non-DeFi projects to collaborate with his company Maelstrom. It will be very interesting to see how he understands the large amount of historical and real-time data we possess and expands its use cases to drive more innovation.

**Odaily Planet Daily: AI is an unstoppable trend. Covalent has been in this field for a long time and naturally has the ability to empower the development of AI+Web3. Do you think the potential of Covalent is currently underestimated? For secondary investors, do you think now is a good time to join the community and support Covalent?

**Ganesh swami：**We have been building for many years, establishing networks, expanding integrations, and attracting some globally renowned enterprises as customers. Especially in the past year, we have formulated a way to ensure the continuity of the network as a major resource for Web3, upon which many enterprises can rely.

AI is becoming more and more interesting in Web3. We have successfully made a name for ourselves in this field and established the largest collection of structured data availability in Web3, which has been favored by AI developers and builders. We have also obtained SOC 2 certification, which is a significant milestone, allowing financial regulatory groups on Wall Street or international enterprises in need of such data certification to know that we ensure the security and integrity of the data from start to finish, which is very valuable.

Now is definitely a good time to join the community and support Covalent Network. We are growing rapidly, and the global community is expanding as well.

Odaily Planet Daily: Let's talk about data and metrics. I want to give everyone the opportunity to examine the Covalent network from various angles. From a data perspective, you have achieved significant growth in many areas. Can you share a few impressive data points with everyone?

Ganesh swami: We now support more than 230 blockchains, and more than 3 billion wallets are supported by Covalent's data. Currently, more than 30,000 developers have used the Covalent network for cross-chain development of over 3,000 major projects. At the same time, our social community has grown rapidly on X (formerly Twitter), Discord, and Telegram, reaching hundreds of thousands of users.

Today I am very happy to see that we are receiving attention in China, and many people are interested in us. We now have 32 operators independently operating on our network.

Odaily Planet Daily: What is the 'New Dawn Plan'? What benefits can CQT holders or stakers get from it? What does it mean for the ecosystem's development? As part of the New Dawn Plan, the Covalent ecosystem airdrop program is currently underway for CQT stakers. What other partner token airdrop programs are planned for the future?

Ganesh swami: The New Dawn Plan is a series of initiatives by Covalent, not a specific plan, but a series of actions implemented one by one. For example, we migrate to Ethereum to make it easier for users to operate, which is part of the New Dawn Plan.

The airdrop program we mentioned is also part of the New Dawn plan. In addition, as a company, we have formulated a new vision, which is also part of it.

Overall, the New Dawn Initiative is about the long-term development of Covalent's comprehensive corporate governance and the transformation of the ecosystem.

Odaily Planet Daily: After adjusting the maximum stake multiple, how will Covalent Network continue to strengthen its staking infrastructure and create more value for the community? Do C-end users have methods to participate in strengthening the network?

Ganesh swami: Next, we may introduce more pledgers in one of two ways. So far, we have received many relevant inquiries.

First, one of the methods we are currently operating is to add more operators and operators in the network. In addition, we have completed some operations, and will continue to debug through more governance in the future, possibly increasing one hundred percent or more data.

We will also consider helping operators join us in a more flexible way, such as using smartphones and more convenient methods to address the issue of adjusting the number of relevant pledgers in the face of large amounts of data and more customers.

**Odaily Daily: How to perceive the value of Covalent in different use cases, not limited to the Web3 domain?

**Ganesh swami：**I believe an important advantage of Covalent is its highly flexible state. This flexibility allows us to promptly obtain transaction information for every on-chain transaction. Once new user cases or opportunities arise, we can quickly understand and launch relevant use cases.

Looking back at our development history, from the initial DeFi API application to the NFT API application, then to the game API application, and now the AI user case, we have always been able to quickly capture various information. In the long run, we will also make progress in other fields.

Although this month is coming to an end, there may be more good news for Covalent and our community next month. I believe we will have more to share with you in July.