Have you ever imagined your data to be smart? I know I haven't not until about three weeks ago when a friend couldn't stop talking about it, as one that can't do without the social media he sure did get my full attention. After getting all details I could get from my friend from what seem to be like a gun point position, my curiosity lead me straight to their website from which I got access to more documents, once I got enlighted I felt it was ideal to share a bit of what I've learnt, thus the reason for this article. The project I've been talking about is called Covelent also known as Cova.

Cova is a new internet protocol of smarter data that remembers, knows when to keep a secret, learns from its users, and more. The team is making these smart data behaviors possible one by one through two pieces of proprietary blockchain technologies; Centrifuge and CovaVM, which will eventually take the form of a brand new internet protocol that complements the current internet infrastructure.

Cova is the Covalent network token and its initially launched as an ERC-20 token based on the Ethereum blockchain. After Covalent’s mainnet is finalized and released, which does not have a projected launch date yet, ERC-20 COVA tokens will be swapped for native COVA blockchain tokens.

Cova is based on three technical features

Trusted Network Environments (TEE’s). The network environment will be created by appointing several network nodes that have the ability to scale their trusted computing power. The TEE nodes will be rewarded for completing computation tasks.

Centrifuge is the programming language of COVA. While Ethereum uses Solidity to write smart contracts, Covalent is utilizing their programming language called Centrifuge to write Smart Policies.

CovaVM (CVM): Covalent is developing an enhanced version of the Ethereum Virtual Machine called CovaVM. As a Policy Enforcement Framework (PEF), CovaVM enforces the policy written in Centrifuge and supports large scale-computations.

With Cova, the owner of a data package can attach a data usage policy that dictates how the data may be used, and makes sure programs operating on it obey the policy, which is referred to as machine-enforceable data usage policy a Smart Policy. They've has received over 10 million dollars of investment from FBG Capital, Huobi Capital, Kenetic Capital, ZhenFund, Metropolis VC, Bluehill, Alphacoin, Node Capital, Alphabit, BA Capital, BlockVC, etc. The elite team is led by co-founder Vincent Li, a Harvard College alum and early employee of A16Z-backed Gigster.com, and co-founder Raymond Gao, a Princeton University alum and early investor of Conjur (acquired by NASDAQ: CYBR).

I'll leave you with a list the 7 implemented layers of Covalent protocol and links to their social media outlets where you'll find a detailed explantion on each Cova implemented layers.

Data Owner: dApp and data storage

Data catalog blockchain

A pool of routing nodes and compute nodes

Threshold encrypted secret storage on routing nodes

Smart Policy Enforcer: Centrifuge and CovaVM running on TEE nodes

Market Economy: Payments and incentives

Data User Interface

Website: http://www.covalent.ai

Telegram: https://t.me/covalentofficial

Twitter: https://twitter.com/covatoken

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

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Covalent_Official/