The Graph vs Covalent Some Real Facts

Graphtronauts
6 min readMar 16, 2022

In the Graphtronauts community people have shared the Covalent vs The Graph post several times. Each user has questioned the information presented as contrary to what they already knew and understood about The Graph.

We will break the page down and look at each comparison that the article covers. Some of the structure and claims reminded me of when the Cheeto guy was making statements. The article in fairness should have really been titled, The Graph vs Covalent, give respect to your elders and all, I mean The Graph came first, first-mover advantage and all.

Objection: Misleading, Sustained

Over 16,000 developers worldwide, have worked on subgraph development over the last two to three years. There are over 10,000 subgraphs already on the hosted service, awaiting migration to the decentralised Mainnet.

I would hardly call 16,000 a shortage, there are numerous points of contact to reach out in The Graph community for companies looking to build a Subgraph, or commission this work to external third parties.

Objection: Misleading, Sustained

The first thing that struck me here was the immediate contradiction

“ONLY FOR DAPPS”, followed by “Graphs customers are mostly Dapps” Surely that needed to say only dapps?

Mostly early in their life cycle, HMM Uniswap, AaveV2.

“Covalent powers all the major wallets, for taxes and forensics and other emergency use cases”

Wait what! it is already powering every wallet platform? Taxes metamask, Trustwallet, no one ever made me aware

1 — Covalent was the tech behind all these wallets
2 — That tax functionality was built into all the wallets Covalent powers already

Aave is a huge platform, Covalent ran a completion recently, a treasure hunt competition the first step was “find the highest liquidation on Aave V2 platform” in their own solutions page

It states the following

While there are a few ways to go about finding the transaction hash, one common way approached by the community was to manually scroll through the list of liquidations presented here on Aavewatch V2Open external link. We suppose they are lucky they didn’t need to scroll too much to find the transaction!

https://www.covalenthq.com/docs/campaigns/dungeons-and-data/aave-liquidations

If you were to open the Aavewatch site and scroll to the bottom of the site, you would see the following message.

Realtime data is being fetched by thegraph

The second other path they described on how entrants could find the information was to use the Covalent API, well I am not saying I fell asleep reading all the steps I need to do to even begin, but I will say if it is a choice between opening a link and having a GUI with the data already called, and easy to sort, or creating an account, getting some variable, inserting another variable then times by PII that subtracting goldfish, I’m opting for the easiest route.

To anyone thinking I am exaggerating, the image is a screen capture of the page, the first block all 8 9 lines is the Graph powered site where you could easily find the answer, the rest of the explanation is the solution via the Covalent API.

You can verify that by visiting Aave liquidations competition solutions (We have the screenshot Covalent team, just saying)

The biggest mistruth, fake news, false claim, outright lie, falsehood, BS of the whole document here

“ONLY FOR ETHEREUM” we have a page on site that covers all the chains The Graph is already indexing, it is public knowledge that the integration news comes thick and fast and is almost daily.

“It is unclear what their multichain future looks like”

Chains already being indexed by The Graph, Ethereum, BSC, Polkadot, Avax, Chainlink, Polygon, Fuse, Fantom, Moonbeam, IPFS, Harmony, Near and more already announced.

Forbes did not seem to agree with the statement of “It is unclear what their multichain future looks like” in the article titled: “Edge & Node, A New Software Development Company Is Launched By The Graph Core Protocol Team”, read the full Forbes article to see how it really is foolish to be even allowing this comparison to take place.

Note the information on decentralised vs centralised:

“The Graph and its evolution brings to focus what can be truly called dSaaS, decentralized Software as a Service.

Meanwhile the Covalent side claims:

“indexers and has customers on 7 different blockchain networks” OK sounds good surely they will let us know who they are “including Matic and others to be announced soon”

In summary: They have only ETH We have lots but we will tell you later promise, surely the statements are mixed up and the following best suits covalent “It is unclear what their multichain future looks like”

Matic, updated their name Polygon in early February 2021, clearly, this information did not get indexed by the team writing this piece of content, let’s hope that API is a bit more accurate.

Objection: Misleading, Sustained

One of the first things that struck me was the vast difference of price in the presale, GRT $0.03 CQT $0.35, 11 times more expensive. But aren’t you already earning sir? Someone once said “when it is centralised it has greed at its core”

The Graph has been running and providing data for over three years, prior to the launch of the token. Major VCs have invested in both companies.

Unclear monetisation prospects: REALLY?

The Graph has already paid out to indexers and delegators since December 17th 2020, all from only one subgraph. April 28th 2021, the first batch of subgraphs were migrated to the main net (aka paying customers), meanwhile Covalent the company that can’t even name the one customer they allowed to declare correctly and writes an article full of misleading information, well we only have their word for it that they are making money already, they only just completed their ICO.

Key information that wasn’t Covered

Decentralised vs Centralised is a whole other article, it also something the nice folks at Covalent decided to not even go near.

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