Thread by @ChainLinkGod

1/ #Chainlink Keepers open beta is now live on the Ethereum mainnet!

Chainlink is truly becoming the one stop shop for any and all decentralized services required to enable hybrid smart contracts

Data
RNG
Compute
Keepers

Let's dive in 👇
blog.chain.link/chainlink-keep…

2/ Keepers are essentially transaction automation bots for blockchain networks

They are crucial because smart contracts are not actually autonomous

The state of a contract can only change when it gets "poked/woken up" by an on-chain transaction or cross-contract interaction

3/ Chainlink Keepers (keeper.chain.link) is decentralized transaction automation service (starting with support for Ethereum but expanding beyond) that is far more reliable and cost-efficient than existing solutions

It is a new Chainlink Network decentralized service

4/ While calling a smart contract function may seem simple on the surface (it's how users interact with DeFi)

Keepers need to provide strong guarantees that a contract will always execute when needed to ensure the contract's proper operation and secure user funds at all times

5/ Projects using a centralized server in their basement as their Keeper "solution" works when building a PoC or MVP, but as the dApp scales up in TVL, greater assurances are needed

A centralized/unreliable keeper is a systemic risk for projects (look at MakerDAO black thursday)

6/ Chainlink Keepers provides dApps the required level of reliability by leveraging a decentralized network of Keeper bots run by the historically reliable Chainlink nodes who already secure tens of billions of dollars in the DeFi ecosystem with Price Feeds

7/ Decentralization ensures that even if all but one Keeper node goes offline, the contract's function would still be called

Also, each Chainlink Keeper node holds and is paid in $LINK, so they have a strong incentive to faithfully trigger TXs or risk devaluing their holdings

8/ In addition to reliability, Chainlink Keepers are highly cost-efficient by leveraging a round robin approach where a single node is selected to call a function at a time (and if they don't, then another node is selected)

This prevents gas price auction wars between nodes

9/ In other Keeper implementations, individual nodes compete amongst one another to call the function and get paid by raising the gas price they're willing to pay, because only the highest gas price will succeed and get paif, while all the other nodes waste gas and don't get paid

10/ Because Keeper services are priced according to the network's current gas price (to ensure profitablity even during blockchain network congestion), a Keeper tx with a higher than necessary gas price will cause a higher than necessary cost to the users directly

11/ In such Keeper solutions where nodes are competing and there is only one winner, Keeper nodes are constantly risking the loss of capital on failed transactions

This leads to a centralization effect from discouraging participation due to costs and whales capturing all jobs

12/ Therefore Chainlink Keepers can ensure reliability, cost-efficiency, and decentralization at all times

There is no limit to the number of use cases that Keepers help enable

It's a generalized transaction automation service but those transactions can do any action

13/ Important: Keepers are distinct from oracles because they do not deliver data, instead they call a predefined smart contract function

Keepers can ping a contract based on a time schedule (e.g. once a day at noon) and/or on an event based schedule (e.g. market price changes)

14/ An implication of this is that Chainlink Keepers can't be "evil" because the only two options is create a transaction or don't

There's no way a Keeper can "half-way" do a task or do a task "wrong", because the logic executed is defined by the contract being called

15/ However, the most powerful usecases will combine and Chainlink Keepers for triggering an action and Price Feeds to validates if the action is valid (e.g. liquidations of user loans)

This is how liquidations can work on @AaveAave (which already uses Chainlink price feeds)

16/ This design pattern could also be used by @synthetix_io when an inverse synth (short position) reaches its upper or lower bound and needs to be frozen

Chainlink Keepers would monitor the contract's on-chain state + Price Feed to determine when a valid freezing can be done

17/ To provide some additional clarification, Chainlink Keepers is entirely separate from Andre's keep3r.network project (KP3R)

The Chainlink Keepers codebase was built from scratch and uses historically reliable Chainlink nodes that can only be paid in $LINK tokens

18/ You can think of keeper.chain.link as the spiritual evolution of Keep3r, but it does not share any its technical characteristics

I think it's extremely likely that the cost-efficiency and reliability of Chainlink Keepers will make it the industry standard

19/ For more info on how the Chainlink Keepers works from a technical and architectural perspective with the on-chain registry contract as well as the checkUpkeep() and performUpkeep() functions, check out the #Chainlink documentation below

docs.chain.link/docs/chainlink…

20/ Keepers is a major step forward for the value proposition of the Chainlink network as a standardized set of off-chain services to enable any hybrid smart contract use case

For more info, check out this based thread

https://twitter.com/Crypto___Oracle/status/1401978216353468417?s=19