Covalent Debuts Non-EVM Data Support to Improve Solana Ecosystem Experience
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Covalent has added Solana support to its "Get Wallet Balance" endpoint, bringing an industry-leading unified API experience to tens of thousands of developers in the Solana ecosystem.
"Get Token Balance of Address" enables developers to get the token balance of any wallet address on Solana, including NFTs, with a single API call.
With this new data, developers can incorporate Solana assets into multi-chain cryptocurrency wallets, NFT galleries, and more.
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Why choose Solana?
For the past 4 years, Covalent has focused on advancing the Web3 space. Hundreds of projects rely on Covalent for indexing and querying across the 26+ blockchains we support. The magic of Covalent lies in its single parameter chain_id, which can be used to query data from the 26+ blockchains we support.
Our vision for entering the Solana ecosystem is to empower developers to build more engaging end-user applications, many of which have yet to be discovered. Covalent is a tool for a billion possibilities, providing all blockchain data in one place in a standardized and easy-to-read format.
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Road to Solana
Indexing Solana is not an easy task. We’ve been able to index 26+ blockchains so far, but they all have one key underlying architecture in common… the EVM.
The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is the execution engine originally invented for the Ethereum blockchain. EVM is now the industry workhorse for all popular smart contract blockchains. The top blockchains we index - Polygon, Avalanche, and Fantom are all based on the EVM.
What makes Solana different?
What makes Solana different?
Solana is what we call a non-EVM chain, meaning its underlying functionality is unlike any blockchain we have indexed to date. Solana's unique architecture makes it faster and cheaper than other blockchains, but it also means we have to make adjustments to export data in a way that meets our standards.
Imagine walking into a supermarket where you usually shop. If you go shopping at the same chain in a different city, generally it's still the same, and you know how to browse.
Now, imagine you are in a completely different country. The shops here are all unique and the labels are written in different languages. In this case, you need to spend more time to find the items you usually buy.
This is the difference between EVM chains and non-EVM chains.
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Why choose Covalent?
Covalent's APIs have been battle-tested by tens of thousands of developers in hundreds of applications. Currently, developers can access Solana data through the "get token account by owner" RPC endpoint, but Covalent goes beyond the RPC layer to get current and historical data.
Covalent's developer experience will never require users to write complex and time-consuming indexing code to extract data. Instead, the developer experience should remain the same even as we expand to more non-EVM chains. We believe in doing the heavy lifting for the lightest, fastest user experience. Making life easier for developers and WAGMI. 💪
Quote from Covalent CEO and Co-Founder Ganesh Swami:
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How we enhance Solana's data
If you are not technical, you can skip this section.
The "Get token account by owner" RPC endpoint is a wonderful start. For background, there is no equivalent endpoint on Ethereum to get all the tokens in a user's wallet.
However, responses from RPC endpoints are not that useful in practice. In fact, it can be quite a pain to make this data useful. We've taken these challenges away from the developer and instead provided some solutions that together lead to a smooth developer experience. like:
NFT metadata - RPC responses from Solana nodes return only NFTs, but not their metadata. Developers will have to make two additional calls before being able to render an image or reveal details about the NFT.
Token Pricing - We have mapped most common tokens back to their Ethereum counterparts. We will develop a Solana-native pricing engine specifically for assets on this blockchain.
Matching slots and blocks - RPC responses only return the current slot of the transaction, but not all slots have blocks. We have a special data worker that additionally does this mapping for developers.
Coin IDs - We return the most popular coin IDs on Solana.
Admittedly, there is still a lot of work to be done. This is just the beginning.
How to get started:
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curl "https://api.covalenthq.com/v1/1399811149/address/CNjUuXWcGrx1VUC2QdBozwNak1F4PatjxvAwXhXrsEy8/balances_v2/"
what's next
Our engineering team is currently blocked by a patch we developed to pull data from Solana nodes. This patch is necessary to get all historical on-chain data. This means users will be able to see mints, transactions and everything else that happened since the genesis block.
We will soon be supporting Solana in all of our Class A endpoints, matching our high standards for rich, clean and formatted blockchain data. Once Type A endpoints are supported, developers will be able to address use cases that were previously untouched due to the need for historical data, for example, tax tools, analytics across different time frames, and detailed information about token holders and token transfers , are some of the ways we're going to go deeper than the RPC layer, giving developers an advantage in their applications.
In the coming weeks, we will release a code template for building wallets on Solana. These templates can be found in ourReplitfirst level title
more resources
Solana RPC Documentation (Tutorial)
