Chainlink Keepers officially launched, intensifying competition in the smart contract automation space
"Chainlink Keepers enable every project to build more advanced hybrid smart contract applications, thereby creating additional value for their users."Author: Richard Lee
Yesterday, the leading oracle project Chainlink announced that its decentralized off-chain computation solution, Chainlink Keepers, has gone live on the Ethereum mainnet and is open for public registration, further intensifying the competition in the smart contract automation space.
According to reports, Chainlink Keepers primarily provides a decentralized off-chain computation layer for various DApps, enabling automatic execution of on-chain functions when predefined conditions are met, such as executing trades when a specific price point is reached. It is said that Chainlink Keepers uses decentralized and verifiable off-chain computation to monitor user-defined conditions and then calls on-chain functions once those conditions are satisfied.
In the past, integrating limit order functionality on DEXs has been challenging. On-chain monitoring is costly, untimely trades can lead to slippage and missed opportunities, and the lack of on-chain verification introduces new trust assumptions that may be unfavorable to users.
The specific mechanism of Chainlink Keepers involves developers creating event-based inputs using keeper jobs, which will be broadcasted on-chain to trigger smart contracts if certain conditions are met. Keeper jobs may include: calling a yield harvesting function once a week at a specific time, or calling a liquidation function when a user's loan collateral is insufficient. The aforementioned keeper jobs involve off-chain computation to confirm whether the verification conditions are met.
In addition to verifiability, Chainlink Keepers claims that its solution also has the advantage of low cost. When running off-chain computations, Chainlink Keepers employs a rotating node selection framework instead of a gas price auction mechanism, thereby reducing costs.
According to a previous compilation by Chain Catcher here, the rotating node selection framework was pioneered by another smart contract automation tool, Gelato. Unlike gas auction-centric models, under the rotating node selection framework, job bots are scheduled in various slots and can only execute trades when it is their turn. This cyclical distribution of trading tasks eliminates competition between bots compared to gas auctions and allows job bots to coordinate with each other, significantly improving the efficiency of automated applications.
According to the announcement, applicable scenarios for Chainlink Keepers include: executing limit orders on decentralized exchanges, minting tokens when reserves increase, harvesting profits from the treasury, rebalancing on-chain trading and yield farming strategies, liquidating under-collateralized loans, releasing locked assets after a period of idleness, and recharging token balances when they fall below a minimum threshold.
Chainlink stated that projects already deployed or being explored include over ten projects such as Aave, PoolTogether, Synthetix, BarnBridge, Alchemix, Bancor, ParaSwap, and B Protocol.
Specifically, Chainlink Keepers will be used to monitor the health of users' off-chain lending transactions by continuously computing collateral and checking whether Aave users' collateralization ratios fall below the pool's predefined liquidation threshold (e.g., 150%). If under-collateralization is detected, Chainlink Keepers will call the liquidation function of the Aave protocol to ensure that borrowers' positions remain solvent;
Synthetix will use Chainlink Keepers for its fee period end service. Chainlink Keepers will call this function after the fee period ends to automatically allocate synthetix.exchange fees and staking rewards;
BarnBridge leverages Chainlink Keepers in its SMART Exposure product to monitor the exposure of off-chain tokenized positions and call BarnBridge's on-chain contract when rebalancing the treasury is needed.
"Chainlink Keepers enable every project to build more advanced hybrid smart contract applications, thereby creating additional value for their users," Chainlink stated.
