Chainlink Keepers Now Live on Polygon Mainnet to Automate Smart Contract DevOps

Polygon Labs

November 18, 2021

Polygon is committed to providing developers with the best infrastructure for building secure and fully functional dApps in an accelerated manner. It’s why we integrated both Chainlink Price Feeds and Chainlink VRF to give developers access to time-tested infrastructure for decentralized price oracles in DeFi and secure RNG in gaming and NFTs.

However, one critical yet overlooked aspect of dApp development is transaction automation services for key smart contract functionality. For example, money markets need undercollateralized loans to be continually marked for liquidation, yield aggregators need yield to be harvested at regular time intervals, and DEXes need limit orders to be triggered when prices cross certain thresholds. None of these processes can run in an automated manner directly on-chain but require off-chain infrastructure.

Instead of these DevOps tasks being performed manually or through a centralized process, we are excited to announce that Chainlink Keepers is now operating live on the Polygon PoS Mainnet as the recommended solution for Polygon developers who need secure smart contract automation. Chainlink Keepers are a decentralized transaction automation service powered by the same Chainlink node operators that currently secure over $75 billion dollars across other Chainlink services. As a result, developers in the Polygon ecosystem can build more advanced, feature-rich dApps that are fully automated end-to-end. If you want to start building with Chainlink Keepers, refer to the developer documentation and start submitting jobs.

Smart contract developers building on Polygon can now outsource their DevOps tasks to Chainlink Keepers, serving as highly reliable and trust-minimized automation bots that perform regular smart contract maintenance tasks on their behalf. Chainlink Keepers use off-chain computation to monitor when various user-defined conditions have been met and then call their on-chain contracts when conditions occur—triggering specific contract logic to run. Not only can Chainlink Keepers fully decentralize the end-to-end operations of dApps, but they can add advanced utilities like bringing limit orders to DEXs. The possibilities are truly endless.

What Are Keepers?

One of the lesser understood realities of smart contracts is that they are asleep by default, meaning they cannot call their own functions. Instead, they need to be woken through an on-chain transaction in order to run their embedded logic. While some protocols can rely on user transactions to trigger functions (e.g. a user buy order on an AMM triggering a swap), a large portion of smart contracts need an external entity, often called a “Keeper,” to make an on-chain transaction when various predefined conditions occur. In essence, Keepers act as automation bots that trigger smart contract execution.

One way to do this is for the development team to manually monitor these conditions in-house through a centralized server. However, this introduces a central point of failure and can consume precious development time and resources that could otherwise be used to improve the business logic of dApps. Instead, developers can outsource their transaction automation services to the decentralized Chainlink Keepers network.

The Benefits of Chainlink Keepers to Developers

Chainlink Keepers is a decentralized network of keepers that provide smart contract automation services in a trust-minimized, cost-efficient, and fully verifiable manner. Chainlink has become an integral part of the DeFi ecosystem. Developers can submit customized jobs to Chainlink Keepers, which involve calling smart contract functions based on predefined conditions. Chainlink Keepers check these conditions through secure off-chain computation, ranging from simply keeping track of time (e.g. 24 hours has passed) to monitoring for specific events (e.g. asset prices crossed a threshold) to performing more complex calculations (e.g. checking the collateralization of loans).

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If you are a developer and want a more in-depth look at how to use Chainlink Keepers, read Chainlink’s developer documentation for Design Patterns and Best Practices. Importantly, Chainlink Keepers is likely to be cheaper to perform on Polygon thanks to its low-cost, scalable network design.

Some of the specific benefits of Chainlink Keepers for Polygon developers include:

Decentralized Execution — Chainlink leverages a decentralized and transparent pool of Keepers to help provide strong guarantees around secure contract automation, saving teams time and mitigating the risks around manual interventions or centralized servers.
Expandable Computation — Chainlink Keepers perform off-chain computations and generate calldata verifiable by smart contracts, allowing developers to build advanced, trust-minimized dApps at lower costs.
High Uptime — Chainlink Keepers are run by the same professional DevOps teams that have an established on-chain performance history of providing high reliability to Chainlink Price Feeds during extreme network congestion and market volatility.
Lower DevOps Costs — Chainlink Keepers have several gas-optimizing features that lower the costs of automating maintenance tasks for users, including a rotating node selection process to prevent gas price auction wars and stabilize costs.

The end result is Polygon developers being able to increase the uptime guarantees of their smart contract operations, save on development costs, shorten go-to market time, add advanced utility to existing dApps, and simplify the experience for token holders.

Chainlink Keepers Use Cases

With Chainlink Keepers now on Polygon, numerous high-quality DeFi projects are actively working on integrating Keepers into their smart contract applications to automate key contract functions. Below are several use cases being pursued by Chainlinked projects.

DFYN

“We’re excited to integrate Chainlink Keepers on Polygon to enable enhanced, decentralized functionality for DFYN and Router Protocol users. The decision to integrate Chainlink Keepers was easy. Keepers are run by the same professional DevOps teams securing Chainlink Price Feeds, which we already use to provide DFYN with high-quality market data on Polygon.” –Ramani Ramachandran, Founder of DFYN

Entropyfi

“We use Chainlink Keepers to automate periodic settlements of prediction markets. Keepers has reduced the complexity of our operation and moved Entropyfi towards better decentralization. We look forward to future innovative products from Chainlink.” –DX, Product Lead at Entropyfi

Ethrone

“We decided to decentralize Ethrone’s winner and prize attribution function using Chainlink Keepers because they are operated by the same pool of time-tested and provably reliable node operators that currently help secure tens of billions of dollars for leading smart contract applications.” –Joaquim Verges, Lead Developer of Ethrone

The combination of Chainlink Keepers and the Polygon ecosystem allows for truly automated smart contract applications to be created that bring more utility to users and higher reliability to Polygon’s DeFi ecosystem. By making Web 3.0 development as sophisticated and agile as Web 2.0 development, Chainlink’s secure off-chain infrastructure introduces a new world of possibilities for Polygon-based dApps.

“The integration of Chainlink Keepers is a pivotal moment for the Polygon ecosystem as it simplifies both the developer and user experience and brings advanced utility to dApps. Developers can now save considerable time and money by outsourcing DevOps tasks to the most proven and reliable network of keepers while users benefit from more utility and automated features that no longer require their manual input,” stated Sandeep Nailwal, Co-founder of Polygon.

“We’re excited to expand the suite of decentralized services available on the Polygon network to include Chainlink Keepers, empowering their developers to build next-generation hybrid smart contract applications that can take advantage of both the data delivery and off-chain computation capabilities of Chainlink. The secure off-chain computation of Chainlink Keepers enables development teams to decentralize their protocols end-to-end and provides exciting new hybrid smart contract capabilities that bring more value to their users,” stated Sergey Nazarov, Co-founder of Chainlink.

About Chainlink

Chainlink is the industry standard for building, accessing, and selling Chainlink oracle services needed to power hybrid smart contracts on any blockchain. Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network provide smart contracts with a way to reliably connect to any external API and leverage secure off-chain computations for enabling feature-rich applications. Chainlink currently secures tens of billions of dollars across DeFi, insurance, gaming, and other major industries, and offers global enterprises and leading data providers a universal gateway to all blockchains.

Learn more about Chainlink by visiting chain.link or read the documentation at docs.chain.link. To discuss an integration, reach out to an expert.

Also read : Chainlink VRF Is Live on Polygon, Providing Developers With a Secure Source of Verifiable Randomness

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