A New Medium

Speaker 0: Hi. This is the DCO podcast, and I'm your host Saurabh. I'm joined by my co host, Sidhar Jain, who is the cofounder of TCO, and he's also an angel investor. Today, we are thrilled to host Ganesh Swamy, the cofounder of Covalent. Ganesh brings a wealth of experience in crypto data and infrastructure.

We often take things like data and infra for granted, But a lot happens behind the scenes to ensure that web 3 applications work smoothly. To give you an example, we know that composability between different applications is one of the promises of blockchains like Ethereum. It necessarily means that these applications need to constantly read data from each other. It is tempting to think that most blockchains, at least the ones that are important right now, are public. So reading the data should be trivial.

Right? But the reality is far from it. Extracting data from blockchains, normalizing it, and delivering it requires sophisticated machinery. Ganesh will help us understand why specialized data providers are needed, how the data provider landscape has evolved over the years, and where we are headed. Before moving on, a caveat for all of you.

DCO members or guests appearing on the show may own assets that will be discussed during the show. Nothing we say here is a financial advice. With that, I'll just try and shut up and let smarter people talk. Let's start with the brief intro of Ganesh and Covalent. Over to you, Ganesh.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Saurabh. Saurabh and Sid, what a great pleasure to be here amongst legends like yourself. Very glad to share my perspective on this space. So by the way of a quick intro, I'm Ganesh Swamy. I'm one of the cofounders and currently the CEO of Covalent.

Covalent is a data infrastructure indexer. So what we do is we scrape on chain data and offer that data in a normalized, unified manner to a variety of different use cases. Today, we index over a 100 blockchains, by far the biggest in the blockchain space, and have over 3 1,000 applications that rely on the Covalent API for their data needs. So we're mission critical, you could say, for a lot of these applications because without the on chain data, the app application is not usable. So that's a quick intro into Covalent.

The word covalent comes from covalent bonds in chemistry, and I spent the first half of my career working on cancer research. And so that's a homage to my to my prior life.

Speaker 2: I think both me and Saurabh, being engineers, can totally relate to that. Right? We spent the better half of our lives preparing for engineering entrance examinations, And chemistry was a big part of it, although we didn't leverage it to the tune of important milestones like cancer research. But we are happy happy to have you for the first edition of the DECO podcast. Ganesh, it's it's a pleasure to be, associated with this and can't can't wait to kind of deep dive into the learnings that you have had while running COVID-nineteen for the past 3 to 4 years.

Right? I still remember meeting you in person during each demo. I think back when Matic was just taking off and COVID-nineteen was getting started as well. Right? It's been quite a long time since then.