The Latency Crisis is Real

Over a year ago, we kicked off an internal moonshot initiative at @Covalent_HQ to reimagine blockchain infrastructure from first principles.

We called it our Manhattan Project - like the wartime R&D effort that brought together the brightest minds to solve an urgent problem.

But ours isn't about physics. It's about blockchain data.

Why?

Because something has fundamentally changed.

Chains now produce blocks in under a second.

Yet most apps still rely on APIs that update every 5–30 seconds.

Legacy indexers. Polling loops. Stale snapshots.

We call this the Latency Crisis - and it’s not just a developer inconvenience.

It’s a systemic failure at the foundation of Web3.

↠ Oracles are outdated by the time they post.

↠ Block explorers lag behind actual chain state.

↠ Dashboards feel broken.

↠ Bots miss profitable trades.

↠ Wallets display stale balances and confuse users.

This isn’t an edge case. It’s the default behavior across the ecosystem.

After 5+ years building Covalent, I can say this with confidence:

The architecture that got us here won’t take us further.

The problem has outgrown the tooling.

So we stopped patching legacy code. Stopping recommending short-term hacks to our 40K+ devs on the @goldrushdev API.

We rebuilt the stack - from raw block ingestion to sub-second data delivery. End to end.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll share what we’ve learned, what we’ve built, and why the next wave of blockchain apps won’t be possible without solving latency at the root.

I'm taking a different direction on X instead of the usually yapping and KOL shilling. I'm going deep.

This is Day 1.

#SpeedRunTheChain

🧵 Follow along.