Chainlink Keepers Now Live on BNB Chain for Securely Automating Smart Contract DevOps

This is a community post written by the Chainlink team and published on .org Blog.

BNB Chain remains dedicated to providing smart contract developers with the best infrastructure for building highly secure and fully-fledged dApps. In pursuit of this goal, both Chainlink Price Feeds and Chainlink VRF were integrated on the BNB Chain mainnet earlier this year, giving developers access to high-quality, tamper-resistant financial market data to protect DeFi applications from flash loans attacks, as well as a verifiable random number generator (RNG) to create truly fair and unbiased gaming and NFT experiences.

Beyond access to data and RNG, another critical but often overlooked component of dApp development is transaction automation services that trigger mission-critical functions within smart contracts. This includes liquidating undercollateralized positions in money markets to maintain solvency, executing limit orders when market prices shift to minimize slippage, harvesting yield at opportune times to ensure higher rates of return, and much more. All of these processes require off-chain infrastructure since smart contracts cannot call their own functions.

Performing these DevOps tasks manually or using centralized processes introduces security risks similar to centralized oracles—manipulation or downtime can lead to core dApp functions not running when required. Therefore, we are excited to announce that Chainlink Keepers is now operating live on the BNB Chain Mainnet as the recommended solution for BNB Chain developers who need secure smart contract automation services. Chainlink Keepers is a decentralized transaction automation service powered by the same collection of provably reliable Chainlink node operators that actively secure over $80B in on-chain value across other Chainlink services.

To begin building with Chainlink Keepers on BNB Chain, refer to the developer documentation and start submitting jobs today.

By outsourcing mission-critical DevOps tasks to Chainlink Keepers, smart contract developers on BNB Chain can now build more advanced, feature-rich dApps that are fully decentralized and automated end-to-end. Developers can submit jobs to Chainlink Keepers. Chainlink Keepers will then monitor the conditions of those jobs using low-cost and verifiable off-chain computation. Once the predefined conditions are satisfied, Chainlink Keepers will automatically call smart contract functions on-chain. The result is dApp security being increased since on-chain functions will run on time without single points failure, as well as the lowering of costs by moving a portion of the dApp’s computation off-chain.

The Role of Keepers

Smart contracts on their own are not autonomous, meaning they cannot inform themselves when to run certain functions. Instead, smart contracts must be triggered by an on-chain transaction in order to run their pre-written code. For some applications, this triggering process is done through user transactions, such as a user swapping a token on a decentralized exchange. However, a large number of smart contracts need an external entity known as a “Keeper” to monitor the contract and make an on-chain transaction that triggers the contract’s execution when certain predefined conditions are met. Such conditions can include the passage of time (e.g. 24 hours has passed), a specific event occurring (e.g. asset price crosses a threshold), and/or performing more complex calculations (e.g. checking loans are undercollateralized).

Keepers effectively act as transaction automation bots that enable smart contracts to become truly autonomous. Before keeper services, development teams had to manually trigger transactions or set up a centralized server. However, this consumes precious developer resources that would otherwise be directed towards the dApp’s core business logic, as well as introduces risks that the contract won’t be triggered at all or will be triggered late. Instead of taking on this security and reliability risk, developers can outsource their on-chain DevOps tasks to Chainlink Keepers.

The Benefits of Chainlink Keepers for BNB Chain Developers

Chainlink Keepers are a decentralized network of keeper nodes that provide smart contracts access to transaction automation capabilities in a trust-minimized, cost-efficient, and highly reliable manner. As a blockchain agnostic network, Chainlink Keepers are able to directly trigger transactions on any integrated chain, meaning there are no cross-dependencies between blockchains. Additionally, with the higher transaction throughput of BNB Chain, Chainlink Keepers can trigger smart contracts at a lower cost and in a more frequent manner.

Smart contract developers can learn more about the architecture of Chainlink Keepers and the process of creating Keeper-compatible contracts by reading the Chainlink Keepers Introduction documentation. Some of the benefits that Chainlink Keepers provide to BNB Chain 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 that’s 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.
  

Through this integration, BNB Chain developers are now able to increase the uptime guarantees and security of their smart contract DevOps tasks, minimize developer workload, decrease go-to-market time, add advanced utility to existing dApps, and simplify the user experience for the BNB Chain community.

Chainlink Keepers Use Cases

With Chainlink Keepers live on BNB Chain mainnet, a number of high-quality leading dApps are actively working on integrating Keepers into their smart contracts to securely automate key contract functions. The following are just a few of the use cases being pursued by Chainlinked projects in the BNB Chain ecosystem.

Beefy Finance

Beefy Finance is a decentralized, multi-chain yield optimizer platform that enables its users to earn compound interest on their crypto holdings. Beefy's vault strategies are modular smart contracts that determine where to deploy assets and how generated yield is allocated back into the base asset. Rewards are regularly harvested, swapped for the original vault asset, and deposited again for compound farming. Beefy Finance is integrating Chainlink Keepers for decentralized automation of the vault harvesting and compounding processes.

“At Beefy Finance, we are committed to decentralization across our protocol. Chainlink Keepers enables us to decentralize the automation of our yield harvesting and compounding strategies resulting in greater reliability and transparency across all our yield optimization strategies and smart contracts.” — Weso, Beefy Finance team

ApeSwap

ApeSwap provides a full suite of DeFi products on BNB Chain, including a decentralized exchange. Users are incentivized to pool liquidity on ApeSwap through yield farming and can use their earned tokens to stake, earn, and unlock exclusive features. ApeSwap is integrating Chainlink Keepers across several use cases, including automated vault compounding, automated pool refills, limit orders and more.

“The crypto-sphere is a place I like to call the ‘Wild West’, where there seems to be no law and no one to trust. Chainlink is one of the few projects we KNOW we can trust. We value Chainlink’s dedication to security, DeFi infrastructure and a decentralization mindset. Chainlink Keepers are tools which allow our team to remove one of the riskiest elements of managing smart contracts from the picture: the human element. We are excited to integrate Chainlink Keepers to help make the ecosystem as secure as possible.” -ApeSwap co-founder Apetastic

DODO

DODO is a decentralized exchange platform powered by the Proactive Market Maker (PMM) algorithm. Chainlink already plays a crucial role in the functioning of DODO by providing reliable, accurate price reference data. By integrating Chainlink Keepers, DODO is now combining multiple Chainlink oracle services to build more advanced smart contracts.

"We're thrilled to integrate Chainlink Keepers on BNB Chain to bring enhanced functionality to the DODO protocol by enabling a new decentralized limit order matching system. Keepers sets the industry standard for secure smart contract automation." -Lei Mingda, DODO Founder

The combination of Chainlink Keepers and the BNB Chain ecosystem ultimately enables the creation of truly autonomous smart contract applications that bring more utility to users and greater security to BNB Chain’s DeFi ecosystem. Chainlink’s off-chain computation capabilities introduces a wide range of new use cases and help make Web 3.0 development as seamless and sophisticated as traditional Web 2.0 development.

​​“The launch of Chainlink Keepers on BNB Chain mainnet enhances the security and reliability of dApps across the rapidly growing BNB Chain ecosystem," said Samy Karim, BNB Chain Ecosystem Coordinator. "Simplifying smart contract development via secure transaction automation service, provides developers and users the increased confidence that on-chain functions can be executed in estimated time-length. Saving time, efforts and resources,” he added.

“We’re thrilled to support the BNB Chain ecosystem with the native integration of Chainlink Keepers, enabling BNB Chain developers to create automated hybrid smart contract applications that take advantage of both Chainlink’s secure data delivery and off-chain computation. With the increased security that Chainlink services like Keepers bring to smart contracts, developers can ultimately decentralize their protocols end-to-end and provide even more value to their users through enhanced capabilities,” stated Johann Eid, Head of Integrations at Chainlink.

About Chainlink

Chainlink is the industry standard for building, accessing, and selling oracle services needed to power hybrid smart contracts on any blockchain. Chainlink oracle networks 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.

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