We are excited to announce that the Chainlink Keepers Open Beta is now opening up for initial users, community review, and feedback.
Chainlink Keepers provide smart contract developers, decentralized applications (dApps), and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) with a highly reliable, decentralized, and cost-efficient method of automating smart contract functions and regular contract maintenance, creating a never-before-seen form of fully decentralized DevOps capabilities. Smart contract applications can use Chainlink Keepers to strengthen the uptime guarantees of critical on-chain functions and achieve end-to-end decentralized automation without relying on an additional layer of trust. The result is DeFi and the broader smart contract economy having more robust infrastructure to scale and secure higher amounts of value for users.
Chainlink Keepers is currently in Open Beta with initial users, so we can gather final feedback and continue to improve the decentralized service’s experience based on user needs. To try the Chainlink Keepers Open Beta, visit https://keeper.chain.link. Please reach out to keeper@chain.link with any feedback. If you want to learn more about Chainlink Keepers on a technical level, visit the Chainlink documentation: https://docs.chain.link/docs/chainlink-keepers/introduction/.
Chainlink Keepers can perform a variety of compute operations, monitoring, and time- and event-based tasks for smart contracts, such as:
- Execute limit orders on decentralized exchanges
- Mint tokens when reserves increase
- Harvest yield from vaults
- Rebase elastic supply tokens
- Trigger automated trading strategies
- Liquidate undercollateralized loans
- Release locked assets after periods of inactivity
- Top up token balances falling below a minimum threshold
As a new decentralized service available through the Chainlink Network, DeFi and other hybrid smart contracts can use Chainlink Keepers as hyper-reliable automation bots for various smart contract operations, initially on Ethereum. Since the Chainlink Keeper Network leverages the same time-tested and battle-hardened pool of professional node operators that currently power Chainlink Data Feeds—now securing billions in smart contract value across DeFi—users receive strong liveness guarantees that critical contract functions will operate as intended. Developers can also eliminate the time, resources, and risks involved with performing keeper operations manually or through centralized systems.
How Chainlink Keepers Enhances Smart Contract Applications
Smart contracts are pieces of code that run deterministically on the blockchain. However, smart contracts have two fundamental limitations: 1) they are disconnected from external resources, limiting their ability to use real-world data or leverage off-chain computations as a means of augmenting on-chain functions, and 2) they are asleep by default, requiring some external entity to wake them up when it’s time to perform on-chain functions and change contract state. Chainlink is actively removing the first limitation for smart contract developers, commonly called the oracle problem, by provisioning an increasingly expansive array of high-quality external data feeds and trust-minimized off-chain computations. Chainlink Keepers now provide a way to overcome the second limitation of reliably automating regular contract triggers.
Chainlink Keepers fill the role of waking up smart contracts by issuing on-chain transactions that trigger the smart contract’s logic to execute on the blockchain. Chainlink Keepers are distinct from Chainlink oracles. Chainlink oracles fetch external data or perform off-chain computation and then store the results on the blockchain, while Chainlink Keepers let the smart contract know when to execute a function. Oftentimes the smart contract will refer to the oracle report as part of its execution after being woken up by the keeper. Chainlink Keepers allows you to define the exact set of conditions on which to trigger the execution of a function. This could be based on time (e.g., every day at 4 PM EST), events (e.g., the completion of a sports event), a computation (e.g., a loan is determined to be undercollateralized), or any combination.
In the early days of DeFi, development teams began decentralizing their oracle mechanism to improve their smart contacts’ end-to-end security and reliability. Chainlink Keepers enable a similar phenomenon, empowering development teams to decentralize their keeper mechanisms to enhance the security and reliability of their smart contract triggers. Since keepers manage critical smart contract functions that are often time-sensitive and responsible for user funds, Chainlink Keepers play a vital role in guaranteeing timely execution of those functions and remove central points of failure like manually run keepers.
To best understand the role of Chainlink Keepers, let’s look at two different use case examples involving Aave and Synthetix:
Aave
Aave is a decentralized money market where users supply collateral to receive on-chain loans. Since Aave loans are over-collateralized—the collateral value/outstanding loan value is greater than 100%—liquidating under-collateralized loans using Chainlink Keepers is critical to keeping Aave lending pools solvent and protecting the capital of lenders.
- Aave registers a Chainlink Keepers job to trigger its liquidation function any time users’ loans fall below the specific pool’s liquidation threshold (e.g., 150%).
- Chainlink Keepers monitor the loan collateralization of users off-chain and call Aave’s liquidation function when under-collateralized loans are detected.
- Aave’s smart contract refers to Chainlink Price Feeds to calculate users’ collateralization ratios and verifies they are under-collateralized.
- Aave’s smart contract liquidates users when their collateralization ratio is below the specified liquidation threshold, ensuring continued solvency of the lending pool.
Synthetix
Synthetix is a decentralized derivatives protocol where users can get on-chain exposure to over-collateralized synthetic assets and trade them with zero slippage against a liquidity pool contract. Maintaining Synthetix requires several keeper functions, including automating the freezing of iSynths—which inversely track the price of assets via Chainlink Price Feeds—when prices reach predefined upper and lower limits, providing end users with more effective leverage.
- Synthetix registers a Chainlink Keepers job to freeze iSynths when upper and lower price bands are hit.
- Chainlink Keepers monitor the price of iSynths off-chain and call Synthetix’s freezerate function when found to hit their predefined upper and lower bounds.
- Synthetix smart contract refers to Chainlink Price Feeds to calculate the value of iSynths and verifies the upper or lower bounds are hit.
- Synthetix smart contract freezes iSynths when upper and lower price bounds are hit, preventing the protocol from becoming overleveraged and protecting stakers in the liquidity pool contract.
Why Chainlink Keepers Provides Development Teams a Superior Keeper Solution
Chainlink Keepers utilizes a decentralized network of security-reviewed and historically proven node operators, already securing tens of billions in DeFi, and utilizing LINK in the existing highly reliable cryptoeconomics of the Chainlink Network. Nodes are selected based on a rotating jobs framework with automated time-based failover to avoid rising user costs from job competition. The architecture of the Chainlink Keeper Network provides several unique benefits to users:
- High Uptime — Chainlink Keepers are run by the same high quality Chainlink nodes, which are already securing tens of billions of TVL throughout DeFi, across various network conditions. Chainlink nodes are operated by professional DevOps teams with established and well-documented on-chain reputations for providing high reliability for existing decentralized oracle networks like price feeds.
- Low Costs — The Chainlink Keeper Network has several gas-optimizing features that can help lower the costs of running maintenance tasks, as well as a rotating node selection process to further lower and stabilize the costs of smart contract DevOps.
- Decentralized Execution — Chainlink leverages a decentralized pool of Keepers for more secure contract automation, saving teams time and mitigating the risks around manual interventions or centralized servers.
- Transparent Reputation — Chainlink provides a robust reputation framework and set of on-chain monitoring tools for users to independently verify the historical performance of Keepers.
- Trust-Minimized Verification – Chainlink Keeper Network allows contracts to verify calldata when keeper jobs are executed before taking any significant actions, making Chainlink Keepers suitable for use in trust-minimized dApps.
- Expandable Computation – Chainlink Keeper Network can perform off-chain computations for smart contracts, allowing developers to build more advanced dApps at lower costs.
By outsourcing smart contract maintenance to Chainlink Keepers, development teams can scale the security and reliability of their decentralized applications to match the increasing TVL they are responsible for securing on behalf of users.
We Want Your Feedback
We’re launching Chainlink Keepers into Open Beta so that the community can participate in the final steps for validating key features, gathering feedback, and improving the developer experience based on your needs. We want to hear from you about how we can improve Chainlink Keepers, so please share any feedback at keeper@chain.link. We look forward to supporting development teams across the ecosystem and ramping Chainlink Keepers into a robust off-chain service that will help power a new generation of highly automated hybrid smart contracts.
Start using Chainlink Keepers in Open Beta today by visiting https://keeper.chain.link or the Chainlink documentation at https://docs.chain.link/docs/chainlink-keepers/introduction/.
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