Covalent Launches Non-EVM Support with Solana Balances

Covalent provides the industry-leading Unified API bringing visibility to billions of Web3 data point launches Non-Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) Support with Solana Balances.

TL;DR:

• Covalent adds support for Solana to its Get token balances for address endpoint, bringing the industry-leading unified API experience to tens of thousands of developers in the Solana ecosystem.
• Get token balances for address enables developers to fetch token balances including NFTs for any wallet address on Solana with a single API call.
• With this new data, developers can include Solana assets in multi-chain crypto wallets, NFT galleries, and more.
• Covalent has submitted a patch, and once approved will have a 90% replica of all historical on-chain data, meaning; mints, transactions, and everything else that has happened since the genesis block.

Why Solana?

Over the past 4 years, Covalent has been laser-focused on pushing the Web3 space forward. Hundreds of projects on the 26+ blockchains that we support, rely on Covalent for their indexing and querying services. The magic of Covalent is the single parameter chain_id that can be used to query data from the 26+ blockchains we support.

Covalent vision for entering the Solana ecosystem is to empower developers to build more compelling end-user applications, many of them as of yet undiscovered. Covalent is the tool that enables one billion possibilities, by providing all blockchain data in one place in a standardized and easy-to-read format.

Solana is the fastest blockchain on the market, focused on scaling applications to support adoption while keeping costs at a minimum. Since the summer of 2021, the new blockchain for indexing our community requested most frequently is Solana. Typically, they can index a blockchain end-to-end in a matter of weeks, so why has it taken so long to add support when the demand has been insatiable?

The Road to Solana

Indexing Solana is no easy task. We’ve been able to index 26+ blockchains so far, but they all had a critical piece of underlying architecture in common… the EVM.

The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is the execution engine initially invented for the Ethereum blockchain. The EVM is now an industry staple for all popular smart-contract blockchains. The top blockchains we’ve indexed – Polygon, Avalanche and Fantom are all EVM based.

Solana is THE first non-EVM blockchain they are adding support for.

What makes Solana different?

Solana is what they call a non-EVM chain, meaning the underlying function is not like any of the blockchains they have indexed to date. Solana’s unique architecture makes it faster and cheaper than other blockchains, but it also means that they have to make adjustments to export the data in a way that matches our standards.

Why Covalent?

The Covalent API is battle-tested by tens of thousands of developers across hundreds of applications. Currently, developers have access to Solana data through getTokenAccountsByOwner RPC endpoints, but Covalent goes above and beyond the RPC layer to fetch both current and historical data on token holders, robust transactions, NFT metadata and market data, and more.

The developer experience with Covalent will never require users to write complex and time-consuming indexing code to extract data. Rather, the developer experience should remain unchanged even as we expand to more non-EVM chains. We believe in doing the heavy lifting to enable the lightest and fastest user experience. Make things easy for developers and WAGMI. 💪

Quote from Ganesh Swami, Covalent CEO & Co-founder

“ We’re excited to be entering the Solana ecosystem and bringing our standard of granular, historical, on-chain data to this highly-requested blockchain. Solana presents a fresh challenge with its unique architecture which we’re eagerly adapting to. Today it’s token balances, tomorrow it’s everything.

About Covalent

Covalent provides the industry-leading Unified API bringing visibility to billions of Web3 data points. Developers use Covalent to build exciting multi-chain applications like crypto wallets, NFT galleries, and investor dashboard tools utilizing data from 26+ blockchains. Covalent is trusted by a community of 15,000+ developers and powers data for 500+ applications including 0x, Zerion, Rainbow Wallet, Rotki, Bitski and many others.

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