In my last article, I wrote about covalent.ai and why it existed and how its virtual machine is different from Ethereum's. The team is progressing nicely holding various meetups in different parts of the world and getting more people to know about it. The name is becoming increasingly popular now. The best part is that they have a private testnet in place. However, not much has been said about it. So I decided to write about it in this post.









There are four components to the private testnet. CovaClave, Secure Server, Secure Models, and CovaChain.

CovaClave utilizes the open source library OS by OscarLab which you can find here. It is basically a Linux OS that supports Intel SGX. Intel SGX stands for Intel Software Guard Extensions and from the name you can tell right away that it is about security.

Let us take a simple example to understand what this means. Assume you decided to build this secure private software that keeps track of your finances. You want to push it to some cloud provider say Azure or EC2. However, you are worried that those providers will be able to access your data (in a real case scenario that really shouldn't happen) but let us assume they can. You start to explore ways to secure and ensure privacy in your software. You land on this technology called Intel SGX that encrypts the data moving between the CPU and the RAM. If the RAM is hacked there is basically no way for the hacker to obtain the data off it. This way you are basically ensuring privacy on the hardware level. Which is what Covalent CovaClave is all about.

The OS used in the testnet was chosen because of its lightweight and has the ability to run the software in an isolated environment, this with SGX support. Making it the best choice for a private processing environment. One question that may arise at this stage is about scaling. It is important for Covalent.ai to scale to be able to support large numbers of users and to have one OS machine running would not suffice and to have many idle machines running would also not suffice as it would be a waste. This is where the second component of testnet comes into play. The Secure Server Component.

This layer is responsible for firing up secure servers through CovaClave. The parent being secure and anonymous would result in a secure and anonymous child. CovaClave would take on the command and spawn the needed servers as needed and per the secure criteria designed. As you know Covalent.ai is not only about secure and anonymous architecture. It is also about secure and private data. To quickly recap covalent.ai allows the user to control their data making it smarter with what is called the policy.

The policy is a set of rules that accompany the data. Through the policy, you can define different commands like where, when and for how long the data is going to be available. You will be able to allow the data to be present for say 2 minutes and then disappear. This policy makes data smarter and is able to control its own fate. Unlike how HTTP is; where data can easily be shared around without a clear guard or control. With Cova:// each data you consume has its own set of rules. Covalent.ai allows this policy to be written in a language they made called Centrifuge . In the testnet, they created python wrappers using the sklean library to deliver a somewhat similar policy to what is intended.

All of this would be useless if it is not stored somewhere. This is what the fourth component of the testnet is all about. Storage. The testnet runs BigChainDB.

They have come a long way with the testnet and have secured several large investors like FBG Capital and you can actually test the testnet by joining the private testnet program or emailing them through [email protected]



Here are more resources if you would like to know more:

Technical Whitepaper: https://docsend.com/view/dvvb75n

Generic Whitepaper: https://github.com/covalent-hq/wiki/wiki

Website: http://www.covalent.ai/

Telegram Group: https://t.me/covalentofficial

Twitter: https://twitter.com/@covatoken

Medium: https://medium.com/@covatoken

