Developers Can Now Register and Manage Chainlink Keeper Jobs with OpenZeppelin Defender

Ornella Cordoba | June 15, 2021

Products

We are excited to announce integrated support for the Chainlink Keepers Open Beta directly within the OpenZeppelin Defender platform—the leading security operations suite for Ethereum and EVM-based chains. Defender is used by leading DeFi and NFT teams such as Aave, Yearn.Finance, Opyn, Synthetix, The Graph, PoolTogether, Foundation Labs, and Balancer.

Smart contract development teams can now register and manage Chainlink Keeper Jobs directly within the Defender platform as a way to outsource contract operations to a decentralized network of professional DevOps for critical functions such as harvesting, liquidations, rebasing, and more. Powered by Chainlink’s industry-leading oracle infrastructure, Chainlink Keepers provides strong uptime guarantees on the automation of critical smart contract functions that are often time-sensitive, allowing teams to mitigate centralized point of failures or under-incentivized processes while managing high-value smart contract systems.

We are proud Chainlink selected us as a key launch partner for Keepers given the Chainlink Network has a long and verifiable track record of providing smart contracts with highly secure and available decentralized services, even during times of high gas prices, network congestion and centralized infrastructure outages. Chainlink Price Feeds are already the most widely used oracle solution in DeFi, securing billions of dollars for leading protocols like Aave, Synthetix, and dYdX. Now, with Chainlink Keepers going into Open Beta, smart contracts can leverage the same network of node operators to serve as trust-minimized automation bots for key contract functions.

To learn more, sign up for our event on June 29th when Patrick Collins, Chainlink Developer Advocate, and Martin Verzilli, OpenZeppelin Software Engineer, will go in-depth on the collaboration.

How Keepers Incorporate Within OpenZeppelin

OpenZeppelin Defender is the first secure operations platform for Ethereum and EVM-based projects to securely automate their smart contract operations, speed up development, and minimize risk. It serves as a standardized development platform that provides teams with the ability to use a set of core tools for managing their smart contracts.

While the Chainlink developer ecosystem has generally focused on smart contract logic and oracles, many teams are beginning to understand the importance of automated operations. Since smart contracts cannot initiate functions or update their state by themselves, they require externally owned accounts to trigger their execution. Keepers provides an option to reliably outsource smart contract operations, most notably to:

Harvest yield from vaults
Perform limit orders on DEXes
Rebase elastic supply tokens
Liquidate undercollateralized loans
Top up minimum token balances
Mint tokens when reserves increase

Many of these functions operate on a regular time schedule (e.g., every day at 4PM PST) or based on external events (e.g., price action). As decentralized protocols begin to scale in value, it becomes increasingly important to provide verifiable reliability for all smart contract functionalities. Inside the Chainlink Keeper network, three main actors exist:

Upkeep – Smart contracts that need external entities to service their maintenance tasks.
Keepers – External actors that execute the published upkeep.
Registry – Feature that provides discovery mechanisms for the above actors and hooks for governance to keep the network healthy.

After writing and uploading an Upkeep contract, Defender will automatically recognize it and display the features within the console.

Once the contract is deployed and verified on Etherscan, Keeper registration can begin (inside Defender and externally to Chainlink via a Google Form). When registration is submitted, there is a waiting period of no longer than a few days after which Upkeep will be registered as valid and assigned a numeric identifier in the Registry. Defender will reflect this on the Chainlink Keeper Network section of the contract’s page.

In order for the contract to be serviced by the network, it needs to be funded with LINK tokens which can be done directly inside of the Defender console. Finally, Upkeep can be monitored via Defender Autotasks and Sentinels so the user may be alerted of failed executions, low funds, or unexecuted tasks.

To get a deeper technical understanding, sign up for our joint webinar and, in the meantime, check out the technical documentation.

Why Chainlink Keepers

The Chainlink Keeper Network offers the most proven DevOps infrastructure for automating smart contract functions, giving Ethereum projects on OpenZeppelin Defender a time-tested and cost-efficient solution for managing key contract operations. This integration provides development teams with built-in access to a decentralized, provably reliable, and cryptoeconomically incentivized network of Keepers that can perform automated maintenance updates on behalf of their smart contracts. Some of the specific features that Chainlink Keepers provide for users include:

High Uptime – Chainlink Keepers are run by professional DevOps with established and well-documented reputations for providing high reliability to Chainlink ecosystem projects.
Low costs – Chainlink Keepers have several gas optimizing features that can help lower the costs of running maintenance tasks. The Chainlink Keeper Network also rotates node selection to avoid job competition, generating lower, more stable costs for users.
Decentralized Execution – Chainlink leverages a decentralized pool of Keeper nodes so teams can more securely automate maintenance, removing centralized processes.
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 Keepers enable contracts to verify calldata when keeper jobs are executed before taking any significant actions, making Chainlink Keepers an ideal service for trust-minimized dApps.
Expandable Computation – Chainlink Keeper Network can perform a wide range of off-chain computations for smart contracts, allowing developers to build feature-rich and cost-efficient dApps.

Requestors can define various job parameters they require from Chainlink Keepers directly within OpenZeppelin Defender for both the Ethereum mainnet and Kovan test network. For an initial release, OpenZeppelin will also provide documentation on setting up a Sentinel that alerts on all job executions, or on certain events (e.g., more than five failures in executions over the past hour). Notifications can be delivered via Email, Slack, Discord, or Telegram. Sentinel alerts can also trigger an Autotask script or push a datapoint to Datadog.

“Chainlink Keepers improves the range of functionality possible through the Defender platform, providing development teams with a decentralized, highly-available, and low cost contract maintenance solution for Ethereum,” stated Demian Brener, Founder and CEO of OpenZeppelin. “By combining Defender with Chainlink Keepers, developers have a full suite of backend infrastructure optimized to best security and reliability practices, accelerating the launch of products into production with minimized risks.”

“By combining Chainlink Keepers with Defender, the leading platform for secure smart contract operations, we are providing a suite of incredibly secure services for automating key contract processes and improving backend development of Ethereum applications.” said Sergey Nazarov, Co-Founder of Chainlink. “Chainlink’s extensive pool of professional node operators, proven cryptoeconomic incentives, and hyper-reliable keeper architecture provide teams with a robust network of Keepers capable of securing core contract maintenance for high-value applications.”

Learn more

To learn more on how to get started using Chainlink Keepers in Defender visit the official documentation page. Sign up for our joint webinar in collaboration with Chainlink on “Managing Maintenance Tasks on Chainlink Keepers Using OpenZeppelin Defender” live on June 29, 12:00 PM PST / 7PM UTC

Learn more about OpenZeppelin Contracts: openzeppelin.com/contracts

See the documentation: docs.openzeppelin.com/contracts