Covalent raises $2M to build a decentralized blockchain data provider

The blockchain data space is getting more and more heated.

A number of notable investors and projects have provided $2 million to Covalent, a project building a decentralized blockchain data provider.

Hashed Ventures led the round with participation from Binance Labs, Coinbase Ventures, Delphi Ventures, Hypersphere Ventures and others. Blockchain projects like Moonbeam, Avalanche, NEAR and Elrond also pitched in the funding round.

Covalent serves data to a number of projects in the DeFi and NFT spaces, including 0x, Zerion and Balancer, and it occupies a similar niche to The Graph (GRT). Ganesh Swami, CEO and co-founder of Covalent, told Cointelegraph that it focuses on a “no-code” approach that distinguishes it from The Graph:

“We do not require developers to write subgraphs or SQL, which means Covalent is more broadly applicable, more mainstream with a bigger addressable market. Covalent is built for the eventual and inevitable merge of DeFi and Fintech.”

The architectural vision for Covalent is that of a decentralized and sharded global database, allowing any kind of granular query into historical blockchain data. Blockchain data projects, in general, can be considered as more advanced and generic blockchain explorers, allowing a much wider selection of data. DuneAnalytics is another project in this field, and it is often used by developers to build custom statistical queries about individual DeFi projects.

The funding obtained by Covalent will be used to decentralize its network, onboarding professional data providers and validators, as well as expanding to more networks. It currently indexes six blockchains, with the team expecting to index a total of 12 blockchains by the end of the year.