PowerPool Community Call #3 RECAP- October 6, 2023
PowerPool completed its 3rd Community Call AMA and discussed its vision of automated web3, PowerAgent’s Gnosis Chain mainnet deployment, our current focuses, insights into our future go-to-market strategy, and answered questions from the community.
If you missed the call, we’ve prepared this recap article for you.
Spaces recording: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1BdxYrlXoNMKX
PowerPool Speakers:
Gordon Gekko — Chief Strategist @gordongekko_CVP
Vasily Sumanov — Director of Research @vasily_sumanov
Recap:
Gordon: Hello everyone! We are now starting this third PowerPool AMA. I am Gordon and I am Chief Strategist of PowerPool DAO, and with me today are Vasily Sumanov, our Director of Research, and @theoriginaldegen, our PowerPool Community Moderator is the host today.
An introduction to PowerPool
Gordon: I will start with a general introduction for the people in the audience who maybe don’t know that much about PowerPool, PowerAgent Network, and our DAO. I will start off by trying to answer the question:
‘Why should anyone want to join PowerPool DAO?’
I think the answer comes in several parts, but one of them is that PowerPool is a fair launch DAO. We don’t have any short-termist whale VCs just waiting to dump our token on your heads. We are a standalone global service or ‘helper’ network and in that sense, we are like ChainLink or ThorChain or other service networks that provide auxiliary services and earn fees for those running our nodes.
PowerPool DAO is a service network that is not aligned with any one L1 ledger or L2 scaling layer. We can, and will, run on any, if not most, of the major EVM chains/layers. If any given EVM L1/L2 explodes, we will be there, and if some EVM chains fail to launch, or dwindle to ghost chains, our members/node operators will just leave those chains behind and move on to others with higher APRs. Our DAO and our automation and compute services network node operators are really all just the same global Community. The PowerAgent Automation Network is a network of independent, standalone fee-earning nodes with very low hardware requirements. Our network can run on potentially all EVM chains and layers, and they all need automation services.
The design philosophy of PowerAgent is entirely consistent with the ethos of Ethereum, emphasizing fully decentralized permissionless home staking on modest hardware, and that makes us also consistent with lots of other L1s and L2s that are also based on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. We all have implicitly the same ethos of small-scale, low-cost home staking, and thanks to our partnership with DAppNode and hopefully in future other bundlers it is possible for most crypto enthusiasts to run a node/Keeper and join our Community. Especially using DAppNode it’s very easy to set up and run a PowerAgent node and thanks to our partnership with DeBridge, our $CVP staking token is pretty much going to be available on every EVM chain that we eventually roll out on. So that makes us effectively a very broad multi-chain network with Keeper nodes running on many, many EVM chains and still accessible with low-cost nodes and low-cost hardware.
So joining the PowerAgent network is a safe bet because our service network will be very broad across lots of chains and not aligned with any one chain or layer. And of course, node runners/Keepers are all earning native token fees. If you’re running a Keeper node you’re earning fees and those fees are commensurate with gas which is all being refunded. Automation services is a very fast-growing market. We have forecasts where up to, say 40 percent of on-chain transactions in the future will be run by automation networks. This is potentially a very, very large home-staker/validator/Keeper fee market that with PowerAgent nodes, most anyone can access with low-cost hardware
PowerAgent Automation Network is not like ChainLink or ThorChain. ChainLink nodes are massive and complex to run. To join ThorChain nodes, you have to run six or eight different validation nodes. In contrast, PowerAgent is a small, lightweight node client you can run on top of any validator for Ethereum or any other EVM chains, and in the future, you will not only be earning automation fees as a member of PowerAgent Automation Network, but you’ll also be able to invest your native token earnings via PowerPool because we plan to automate various LST investment vehicles so our Community can invest and auto- farm their LST assets using our own tools and automation network. So it’s really possible for pretty much anybody, depending on your interests, to get something out of joining and participating in PowerPool DAO.
How can you contribute to PowerPool DAO?
Gordon: So how do you contribute? Well, the main way you contribute is to run a Keeper node. We need a lot of Keepers to deploy on a lot of EVM chains. We need Keepers that can run on as many EVM chains as possible. And we need those Keepers also to help us recruit Job Owners, developers who need to automate, and we have grants available for node operators who want to become Keepers and we have grants available for Job Owners who need to swap out some of their internal automation, which is a central point of failure and a regulatory risk, and substitute PowerAgent decentralized, trustworthy automation for which we also offer grants. By joining the DAO, you also get involved in the grant process. But if you’re not technical at all and you don’t see yourself actually running any hardware, you can still participate in the DAO. We need a lot of translation work to create a truly global network which is low-cost and accessible to people in all countries. As we roll out across different EVM chains, each chain will eventually end up with a Chain Ambassador who knows the protocols on that chain and who knows the core developers on that chain. We will be selecting those Chain Ambassadors from people who are doing a good job on translation so getting involved that way, particularly if you have good languages, (we’re good in English, Turkish, and Russian), but Spanish, Portuguese, and especially all the Asian languages, we need several more Translation contributors if we’re going to be a truly global network.
You can also participate in our Discord just by asking good questions because if you have the question, then other people probably have the question too. By getting those threads running in Discord, we make it a lot easier for people to join and participate in the DAO. And finally, following us on Twitter, or X as it is now, and just retweeting and liking PowerPool-related posts on X makes a huge difference to the reach of that post. So unless you radically disagree, it’s best to retweet and like these posts and that can be a big contribution.
I am a prolific shit-poster on X and if you really want to know what’s going on, sometimes the best way is to follow me on X. In addition to PowerPool-related posts, I also get into discussions with other people about how things should be done. You might find those things beneficial as well. And I hope you give those posts a few likes and retweets as well. So with that as a broad overall introduction to PowerPool DAO and PowerAgent Network, I’d like to introduce our Director of Research Vasily Sumanov. He will tell you more about his recent conferences, alliances in the works, and the progress we’re making on network rollout across various chains.
So Vasily, would you like to bring us up to date?
The future of web3 is automated
Vasily: Thanks Gordon for this really deep introduction to PowerPool. I want to start with a reference to our automation narrative. Our overarching narrative or forecast is that we expect that in three years, about 40% of transactions will be signed not by end users themselves, but by automation agents, usually Keeper-based automation networks like PowerAgent as we define them.
That sounds like a big statement that in the future users won’t sign all the transactions themselves. For some people, this can sound like something violating the core values of blockchain, essentially because the core values are self-custody and manual transaction signing. In other words, the norm to date is that nobody can transfer your BTC or ETH tokens or any other assets from your wallet without your personal signature. This is how we experience the blockchain now, we do whatever we want ourselves, and all transactions are signed only by us. We think that in the future this paradigm will change somewhat. But you may ask: how can that happen without violating core blockchain values?
Currently, and in the past, you have probably been using many different, especially DeFi protocols, but what most of you do not know is that these protocols are already using automation ‘under the hood’. When you deposit assets to some protocol, this protocol already does some transactions on your behalf, and you usually do not even know. The protocol tracks or records your yields and sometimes it protects your liquidations, or it allows you to set up limit orders or does other stuff that is quite logical, primarily using on-chain data and computation.
All of these products are already powered by some kind of usually centralized automation bots or networks ‘under the hood’, so our future forecast takes into account that account abstraction and safe integrations will become evermore widespread by adopted solutions. Increasingly, some of the transactions from your wallet could potentially be signed by your appointed Agents or some other entities, rather than yourself.
The most recent example is Gnosis Pay, the cryptocurrency debit card issued that you can use in the real world to pay your fiat expenses. If you have an account in the roll-up launched on top of a Gnosis Chain, the Keeper bots from Gelato, our competitor in automation, can take some assets from your account whenever you pay by card. They receive the trigger that you spend some money from the card, say you spend 30 tokens from a card and they will take 30 tokens from your account and send it to the card operator to cover the fiat costs and the principal amount of money that was transferred from.
Other cryptocurrency card operators, like Wirex, are also going by this path. They are shifting more and more of their operations on-chain. So they say okay, now you own all your own funds, so if for example, the license of Gnosis Pay is withdrawn by the regulator authority, your money will not become stuck in their bank account or the electronic money payment system. Your funds are only your funds that you custody yourself, but now, the Keeper automation network can act as your Agent inside the client protocol, you can automatically take part of the money according to your spending on the fiat card from your account. So automation agents or Keepers are now shifting the paradigm and users are happy with this because the value that is provided by automated cryptocurrency cards is quite good. So now you can use your crypto in the real world without having the custody risk with an electronic money issuer counterparty. We expect that in the future, these types of use cases will be expanded a lot.
I’ve been attending the DAppCon and ProtocolBerg conferences in Berlin and there I had a quite good discussion with Stefan George, the Gnosis Chain founder, regarding the future of Gnosis Chain. His vision is very aligned with what we are thinking about. He told me that in the future, Gnosis Chain probably will be one of the first EVM chains featuring a high proportion of automated transactions executed on-chain. So, for example, currently, if you want to buy some asset on a DEX, you need to go to the DEX to sign the transaction and you need to do all of this manually. But in the future possibly there will be an option for you to just click the button which sends the trigger to the automation network to take some assets from your wallet, make the swap, and deposit these assets back into your wallet. Since the fees on Gnosis Chain network are quite low, they’re just fractions of US dollar cents.
Even if you pay for the gas and for the execution fee on top it’s just not a big deal, taking into account the overall convenience and automatic nature of the process. So this is the vision of Gnosis Chain and PowerAgent is fully supporting this vision. This is our shared vision that can really bring adoption and can really simplify on-chain interactions for users. So today, what we are thinking in PowerPool is that automation networks are not designed only for automating some processes and some protocols under the hood, some automated operations, yield harvesting, etc, but we’re also thinking that the automation networks will change how users and networks interact with each other. Currently, users interact with their wallets only with their personal signature making everything manual. In the future, we see that this will change, networks will do more for users, they will abstract a lot of complexity, and this will drive adoption. If we want to onboard millions of users in crypto over the next few years, we need to provide the most convenient option for them. We don’t need to educate them from zero to one about everything, right? We need to provide them with something that really works and really provides value to them. So the use case for Keeper automation networks is much broader than just automating some backend features and protocols or doing simple tasks for users. It’s about how users and blockchains interact and how users are able to best use everything encrypted.
This is what will be changing in the next few years and this is what we want to change by developing PowerAgent. So if someone could possibly sign transactions as your Agent, on your behalf, what do you require from these signers? From these professional transaction signers as I define them. You want them to be trustworthy, reliable, robust, and decentralized. You want them to be really responsible for all actions, to be sure that there won’t be any malicious behavior from them, and that they won’t transfer any assets without any authorization from your side or from some other protocol. This can be achieved only if you have a lot of nodes, or Keepers, and you have proper crypto-economic incentives, like we have in PowerAgent, with staking of tokens and slashing, such that all Keepers have value-based responsibility for all their possibly dishonest actions. These are the basic requirements for trustworthy automation to work at scale and currently, we don’t see other automation networks that comply even with these basic requirements.
None of the alternatives have hundreds of nodes at this moment. None of them have staking and slashing models, none of them can handle thousands of transactions per hour, etc. So this is the ultimate vision for PowerAgent, to develop a scalable, multichain trustworthy automation network that will be able to handle all of these future expected interactions for users without compromising their privacy, security, or their self-custody rights, which are the core blockchain values.
PowerAgent’s Gnosis Chain mainnet deployment
Vasily: So this is what we’re building and one of the biggest milestones for PowerPool so far, since the development of PowerAgent V2, is the current Gnosis Chain mainnet deployment because, as I said before, Gnosis Chain is a chain with very low fees. So it unlocks a lot of automation cases that are currently not economically predictable or reasonable on Ethereum. This is the first point.
The second point is that Gnosis Chain has quite similar EVM tech and the exact same consensus mechanism as Ethereum. So it allows us to use it as a source of randomness. It’s just a pure tech point, but it’s also very important for deployment.
The third point is that Gnosis Chain has the same shared vision of the centrality of automation with PowerPool. They want to be automated as soon as possible, automate as many interactions, and abstract as much complexity from users as possible. For us, it’s a perfect match because we want the same and Gnosis Chain is a very very good point to start this expansion, to start all this process, and bring it to life.
So we expect even in Gnosis Chain, there is currently not such a big variety of protocols so the number of use cases that we can automate is a lot, and the possibility to engage users in all this account abstraction, signing, etc, is also quite big because that adoption was already started on Gnosis Chain. Gelato Network and Gnosis Pay were the first examples of implementing account abstraction. Not for some specific use case, but for the broad use case with possibly millions of users. Wirex does the same with zkEVM roll-ups on Polygon. It’s also important that some other big companies with a lot of licenses, and a lot of regulation, with six million users, active users, that are using their cryptocurrency cards, are shifting to this on-chain automation paradigm. We want to be there and be number one. So this is why we are starting with Gnosis Chain, and we are going as fast as possible. We have already released the official announcement about the Gnosis Chain deployment.
PowerPool is gathering Gnosis Chain validators
Vasily: We have now released the Google Keeper sign-up form for Gnosis Chain validators because we think that the ideal Keeper is also a validator on the network because the validator already has a node, he has access to an RPC, and he has a large motivation to make the network even more valuable for users, to get more users in the future because every validator shares the success of the network by receiving the transaction fees, at least a share of them, of course. So for validators, it’s extremely easy to launch PowerAgent Keeper nodes. Especially on Gnosis Chain, we don’t have any barriers to launching PowerAgent. Just go to DAppNode, click one button, spend five minutes, and your Gnosis Chain Keeper is set up.
Or if you’re not using DAppNode for some reason, it’s also quite simple to do an installation on top of your existing validator. We want to get at least 100 Keepers running on Gnosis Chain to ensure a reliable level of decentralization there. So if you are a Gnosis Chain validator or you know Gnosis Chain validators, the best option for you is to access our forms, and apply to the testnet(s). We will make some preliminary tests for all upcoming validators and for all new Keepers to ensure that they understand how PowerAgent works, to ensure that they’re doing everything correctly, and that they won’t get slashed on the mainnet because it can be expensive to be slashed. We want to decrease start-up risks for validators and make all the preparations in a safe sandbox for them. We planned to do all this on Sepolia to prepare everyone for mainnet, but today we decided to also do this on Gnosis Chain to further lower the barrier for joining PowerAgent for Gnosis Chain validators, to not require them to spend time and resources launching any new nodes. Now you can just use your existing Gnosis Chain validator and just set up PowerAgent in several clicks.
Projects that are building on top of PowerAgent
Vasily: We are also already involving the developers from Gnosis Chain to develop some automated products and services, starting with some simple ones like limit orders, liquidation protection, and vaults. These three are our main focus so far. For example, we have already onboarded a CowSwap team member to the PowerPool testnet in preparation for automation of limit orders on CowSwap. Maybe you know that CowSwap is one of the biggest innovations in trading because it allows swaps without the front-end risks and also the gas swaps which are quite important for small users and small swaps. They’re growing a lot and I think PowerAgent automation will become quite valuable for all the CowSwap users, making limit orders automatically placed and withdrawn, for example. You can automate taking profits or stop losses, anything you want without any manual interaction and any necessity to track it all the time by yourself and spend your time and attention. We are also talking with Balancer regarding some developers working on limit orders for Balancer as well.
So we are already moving really fast and want to develop something for maybe a top five, top seven projects on Gnosis Chain in the coming month or two. So to have limit orders, fiduciary protection, and vaults, three simple types of products that can be easily developed, easily launched, and can be fully automated by PowerAgent and bring a lot of value to all these projects that are already deployed on Gnosis Chain. This is our vision for developer acquisition. We are offering grants up to 20k US dollars for builders who want to build something on top of PowerAgent.
Besides Gnosis Chain, we are also starting some conversations with developers on future chains on our roadmap to be prepared for when the Ethereum mainnet launch comes. We already have some builders that have started their work. For example, I had a quite good conversation with Carbon DEX (originally Bancor). Carbon is an asymmetric liquidity limit order protocol on Ethereum. It’s quite an interesting project that makes liquidity-based limit orders. So all users place some limit orders for two particular assets, and the set of all these limit orders forms the overall liquidity in the system for these two assets. So it’s of course a separate topic, how it all works. But from what I can see, they also need automation for placing limit orders, shifting limit orders, and evaluating conditions for the stop losses that they don’t already have by design. So Carbon DEX can be quite a good application for PowerAgent automation on the Ethereum mainnet.
So also, besides that, we’re also discussing some grants with projects that make transaction bundling. In simple terms, they make good user interfaces for launching tasks and bundling several transactions into one, making it easier for users. One of these projects is Partitura and we are finalizing the grant application for them. This will go to the DAO for voting soon.
We plan to issue many more grants, and to make this easier, we have onboarded PowerPool to Gitcoin, to use the new type of Gitcoin grants for builders, to make our grants accessible to a much bigger audience of builders, and to automate the process of grant approval, the grant distribution, the control of the milestones by the team and the Community at the same time. We aim to make an official announcement about the Gitcoin partnership soon, once they release the $CVP as a means of grant payment. We expect that we can get access and get exposure to a much bigger number of developers because Gitcoin is a leader in grants and some types of funded tasks like developer tasks, etc. We plan to use Gitcoin for funding automation grants on different chains.
Also, Gitcoin should become a multi-purpose tool for us and probably we can conduct campaigns for the Keepers/Noderunners on top of Gitcoin as well. This is a powerful tool that we want to use and we already completed all the negotiations and have tested the technology, the grant distribution interface, how to register new applications, how to distribute funds, how to control the milestones, how to make all these technical operations making the grant process really smooth and seamless, and making it even easier to apply for a grant. So this is a big partnership for PowerPool to engage far more builders.
We are already talking to around 30 projects at this moment regarding the grants for building something on top of PowerAgent. For some projects, it’s very slow. But for some of them, we are having some success with the grant applications. So I think that we will be announcing more and more projects that will use PowerAgent automation for automating their needs or needs of their users in the near future.
Decentralized RPC providers
Vasily: We’re talking with several decentralized RPC protocols like Fluence, like BlockP, and probably there are some others. We want to provide additional RPC options for our Keepers, because as Gordon said before, service networks like say, the liquidity network THORChain chain requires running several validators at the same time, and it can be several full nodes which is quite resource-consuming for an ordinary user. Unlike THORChain, we don’t want to have 30 or 40 whales that can run six nodes at a time, instead, we want to have thousands of people that can run one or two nodes at a time, maximum. So we need to also provide an additional option to use decentralized RPC solutions because decentralized RPC solutions can be much more reliable than Infura or centralized RPCs. As we discussed, centralized RPCs are not a good option for Keepers at all. However, decentralized RPCs are also powered by hundreds of nodes that provide RPC services can be a solution for some nodes to add a new chain to their PowerAgent Keeper dashboard.
Just imagine you have two or three full nodes running at the same time and then there is, say, a new Neon EVM deployment and you also want to be a Keeper on Neon chain, which means you also need to run a full node on Neon chain, that could be like the third or fourth node for a given Keeper. This may be unsuitable for a lot of Keepers. We decided that we could come to a compromise. But this is a decentralized compromise, not a compromise like, OK, use your centralized RPC, it will be fine. No, it’s not like that, we want to provide Keepers with a decentralized option to abstract the node running costs in some cases. So, decentralized RPCs are also coming. So we are talking with at least two RPC projects and it’s going quite well. So we just need to get some updates from the tech and enable the web sockets to get these RPCs fully set up for use by PowerAgent Keepers.
PowerPool’s current focuses
Vasily: So, in summary, PowerPool is working not only on mainnet deployment. We are working at the same time in several directions. One direction is to onboard as many Keepers as possible, as many reliable Keepers that are also validators that want to contribute to each EVM network, increase decentralization, security, and also earn as a PowerAgent Keeper at the same time.
We’re also working on onboarding builders, providing builder grants, and talking with projects. And we have set up the Gitcoin grants partnership and future campaigns will be run on Gitcoin.
The third direction is to get more projects on future EVM chains, which PowerAgent has not deployed on yet, but to have some steps done and make it really fast in the future when we will deploy there.
The fourth is to add some new features to the tech stack, to the infrastructure around PowerAgent, to allow people to use it more cheaply and simply. It is possible now and we think that decentralized RPCs are one of the ways to get more Keepers that cannot afford the hardware to run a lot of full nodes. So this also is a big point for the PowerPool decentralization, validators, and onboarding Keepers in the future.
We’re attending conferences a lot. We’ve attended maybe five or six conferences so far in September. I’ve personally been at DAppCon and had a chat with more than 10 projects that want to use PowerAgent, specifically with the Gnosis Chain team and Gnosis Chain founders. And we got full support from Gnosis Chain. So they also dedicate resources to help PowerPool onboard as many validators as possible and provide brand awareness there. Thanks to Gnosis Chain for this!
I’ve also been at ProtocolBerg in Berlin. It was also quite good. I’ve got several projects that could possibly use PowerAgent in the future. The other part of the team was at Token2049, Korean Blockchain Week, and probably at one more conference that I cannot remember because I personally wasn’t there. So this is a multi-purpose work, but it’s all done at the same time.
Also, we’re releasing content, AMAs, and all this kind of stuff. We have a lot of unreleased content in Zero Knowledge proofs (ZK). We have already implemented 128-bit logarithms in Solidity, for the first time ever. It’s also a gas-efficient algorithm. We needed logarithm calculation for the stake weighting function in PowerPool, gas-efficient to avoid unnecessary gas costs. We were able to do all this thanks to our technical research team. This article will also be released soon, probably this weekend or on Monday.
We have quite a lot of content on ZK because we are planning to make ZK resolvers. But these are not short-term plans. It will be a little bit later because now we are much more focused on mainnet deployments and validators, keepers, jobs acquisition, and developer relations with projects on Gnosis Chain and our near future chains.
We plan to get ZK resolvers maybe next year. But this ZK field of work is also developing. We are also already making partnerships with quite reliable teams in the ZK space.
So that’s most of the current news. Gordon, from your side, do you have some other questions for me about what we need to share with our audience? And if we don’t have anything else, I will provide some short-term plans, what we plan to do next week and maybe two weeks. What to expect from PowerPool, how you can contribute to PowerPool DAO, and how you can help growth in these two weeks. And then we can go and address the questions that I already see in the chat.
Answering questions from the community
Gordon: Yeah, I think we have some interesting questions. I think we should just start with those. I’ll read the first one:
“You have compared ChainLink and PowerAgent many times. What will make PowerAgent more attractive?”
This is a good question. I think the first thing to remember is that if you’re attacking a market segment and you don’t have any competitors, you’re in the wrong segment. ChainLink will be a big and powerful competitor in the automation segment. But they will not be a monopoly. Nature abhors a monopoly.
ChainLink is pursuing a very broad range of services. They’re a broad network of networks, what they call Distributed Oracle Networks (DONs). They were first and were primarily architectured to solve the oracle problem. But they are now pushing heavily into lots of other services, including automation services.
But they are not permissionless like us and their nodes are very heavy. It is complex, expensive, and extremely difficult to run a ChainLink node. It is also not really clear that they’ve focused tightly on trustworthy automation the way we have. Why is that important? Well, their strategy is to be the ‘one stop shop’ where people go for all services. It means that if you’re trusting ChainLink for oracle services, you don’t have to trust anything extra to get automation. And so that makes everyone a $LINK bag holder, but they’re pricing in US dollars, which makes it a lot easier for people to compare. So I would make reference to lots of other markets where you have a big, powerful, broad-range number one, but you almost always, always have a nice little profitable tightly-focussed number two.
I expect us to be able to compete quite easily with ChainLink in just Automation Services on a variety of dimensions. First of all, they’re targeting big-time TradFi on Ethereum mainnet kind of stuff. And they should.
But we are not targeting that primarily. We want our small, nimble clients on chains like Gnosis Chain, and on chains like Neon EVM with access to Solana. Effectively, we want to be number two to ChainLink automation on price and nimbleness and also decentralization and to some extent, trustworthiness.
Why? Well, because we have a random allocation of Jobs. We have Keeper slashing. We have a lot of things they don’t have. And it’s not going to be easy for them to beat us on everything in automation because they have a lot of other things to worry about. So we probably won’t have as many total automated transactions as ChainLink, but that’s OK because the market is vast and growing fast.
As long as we stay light, nimble, low-cost, international, fully decentralized, and totally consistent with Ethereum, we’ll be fine. We’ll be fine. No one, no one, wants a ChainLink monopoly, not even TradFi wants a ChainLink monopoly. I’m in discussions with people on the forums for Corda and Quorum, which are TradFi private chains. They’re terrified that ChainLink is going to roll out a chain and just obsolete them totally with a full-service automated private chain. So nobody wants a monopoly.
ChainLink will not have a monopoly. We want to be a strong number two and we can do it. There will always be chains where ChainLink just doesn’t have time, energy, or interest and we’ll be there because we’re light, we’re small, we’re nimble, we’re global in ways that they can’t be.
But yeah, if you ask me, do I think that PowerAgent is going to run more total value of automated transactions than ChainLink? No, we’re likely not. And that’s OK. I can live with it. I think our DAO can live with it, too. So Vasily, did you want to add anything on ChainLink?
Vasily: I think that you covered the topic quite well. So yeah, there will be different automation networks. PowerAgent won’t be a monopolist, either of course. There may eventually be five or ten of them or even more because as we know, there are some startups that are developing right now. But of course, they are all far behind PowerPool in terms of launching on mainnet with a go-to-market strategy. So we expect that there will be several automation networks, but each of them will have its own features, its own client base, and its own share of the market. I think that even taking and owning say 10 percent of the automation market is a lot. It’s quite a huge share. So if we will get at least 10 percent, it will be really good. So for PowerPool, it’s necessary to find its own niche, but given the forecast growth in the market, our share will be worth a lot of fees. The PayPal founder, Peter Thiel, once said that you need to grow your own small market and only then get some bigger markets. And I think that’s true for PowerPool.
Gordon: It’s an absolute advantage for us to have a dominant leader in auxiliary services like ChainLink because everybody will soon know about the importance of automation options. Everybody will be evaluating automation options. And I think ChainLink will overprice their automation as a way of cashing in on their broad range of services and existing relationships. And we can just come in and undercut them. And people will either say yes or no. But it does not detract from the fact that we’re not going to have to explain automation to anybody.
Everybody is going to be comparative shopping. Nobody gets just one quote. If you go to your boss and say, oh, we need automation services. Here’s ChainLink’s quote. What is your boss’s first question going to be? They are going to ask ‘Can you give me another quote?’
So it’s a positive advantage for us to be a small, nimble number two sheltering behind ChainLink out there beating down everyone’s door on behalf of automation services.
Vasily: Yeah, yeah, that’s true. So let’s move to the next question.
Gordon: Well, the next question is basically the same competitive position question related to Gelato and Keep3r. So slightly different answers. First of all, I’m not 100 percent convinced that Gelato is totally dedicated to automation. They have a lot of other stuff they’re doing on zero knowledge and supporting zero knowledge EVMs and stuff like that. They don’t have nearly as advanced a trustworthy automation solution as we do. And Vasily can explain much more about that. And the same is true of Keep3r. Keep3r was something that Andre Cronje started up because he needed automation and he knew that decentralizing was better than running his own keeper bots. I don’t think it’s evolving very fast. It certainly can’t compare to PowerAgent version two. And I think without Andre, it’s not going anywhere.
Vasily: I just want to add that PowerAgent is a much more industrialized alternative to Gelato or Keep3r network. Even with the current Sepolia testnet, we have around 50 validators, ~50 Keeper nodes at this moment on the Sepolia testnet. And we will soon have ~50 nodes on Gnosis Chain, which we expect, because Keepers will just change the nodes they are running in DAppNode and easily convert the Sepolia Keeper node to the Gnosis Chain Keeper node, it won’t take any time. So PowerAgent will already be a much more industrialized option. And taking into account all the crypto mechanics; slashing, staking and random selection, etc, it all takes time. So from a technical point of view, PowerAgent is much more industrialized than Gelato or Keep3r network at this time.
The next step will be feedback from Job Owner users. We will see how these relative automation value propositions will be evaluated by Job Owner users. Will we get any advantages based on our design and industrialization or not? I hope that, of course, we will. So now we are working in this direction to onboard as many projects as we can and as many nodes as we can. Track record and performance will speak for themselves.
Gordon: There are new L1s still being launched. I mean, it’s surprising but true. So it’s just a question of finding the EVM L1s that are interesting to us, where we have demand for automation, where we can get nice juicy grants to roll out on these chains because every EVM L1 is going to need automation and they can’t provide it themselves. They need someone else to do it for them.
Even Corda, a permissioned, private EVM chain. I have an interesting conversation going on with Corda about how are you going to neutralize or compete with ChainLink’s new chain, given that you have no automation and they have no answers. I believe Chainlink will eventually roll out a full private L1. And all these other TradFi chains are terrified. So who knows what will happen?
But the point is that as we’ve done with Gnosis Chain, we’re targeting low-cost, lightweight. And then the other one, of course, is the NEON EVM, which is an EVM gateway to Solana, which, as we all know, is very fast and cheap. So people who are attracted to fast and cheap Solana are going to want NEON-based automation from PowerAgent. ChainLink will probably never run on NEON EVM. I’d be willing to bet you they just won’t ever be there. So as the chains, as L1s and L2s proliferate, ChainLink has to make their decisions. Where are you going to go? And we can then make our decision about where we’re going to go and we’ll be fine.
Vasily: Yep. So let’s probably move to the last question.
Gordon: Right. Yes. The last question was about LSTs.
If you follow me on X, you’ll know that there’s a huge debate about what to do about Lido and the concentration of LSTs in a dominant power-law VC control situation. And I have pointed out more than once on X that we have a proposed new product, which is a fully automated, diversified basket of LSTs, very similar to products we’ve launched in the past, and that if the whales want to support us, we can quickly and easily roll out a fully-automated, diversified basket of LSTs. We plan to do this eventually on every EVM chain because once we have all LST transactions automated on a chain, every EVM chain, as long as it’s proof of stake, which they almost all are, DeFi on every single chain is moving towards using LSTs as a basis for DeFI. This is sometimes called LSTFi.
But no one likes single LST solutions. Everybody wants diversified basket LST solutions on which they can then build, whether they want to use it as collateral, whether they want to mint stable coins, whether they want to just make payments with it, who knows?
So another reason why I’m not afraid of ChainLink is that ChainLink can never do automated LST baskets. They can never be an asset manager because it would mean competing with their own clients. So it’s totally open space for us to go in and say, look, we’re going to be first mover. We’re going to monopolize the automated LST basket on every single EVM chain that we run on.
This is a big benefit to our Community because all of the earnings of our Keepers can go straight into our own LST basket(s) and immediately get auto-farmed for yield and enjoy a lot of other benefits because LST baskets are higher return and lower risk. They’re higher return because you get more of the block rewards and they’re lower risk because your smart contract risk is spread across a lot of LSTs.
So as a DAO, we have effectively two legs. I mean, ChainLink has many more legs than we do, but they don’t have any asset management and never can and never will. We can add LST asset management and we can offer developers tokenized multi-LST basket options, saying you can launch your own DeFi product and we can automate some transactions for you. Or you can launch an LSTFi product on top of our auto-managed basket of LSTs, which is lower risk, higher return, and better collateral than any single LST can ever be. And this will all be known and proven to everybody because of the pain that Ethereum is going through with what happens when you create LSTs the way they did. And Lido with a bunch of VCs step in and try to take over your chain, which is what’s happening. So we’re well positioned to be the leader on auto-farmed LST baskets. And it is just a question of when whales and Vitalik and all the other leaders of the Ethereum community say we want baskets. No one should hold just a single LST.
But meanwhile, most of the other chains we launch on also have some kind of LSTs. In fact, I’m trying to figure out how on NEON we can do Solana LSTs because there are several Solana LSTs that belong in a basket, too. So that’s the main point, which is that PowerPool began as a DeFi basket and vault automation protocol. We know how to do this. We’ve done it before. And if anybody steps up with big money, we could do it again.
And by the way, everybody talks about ETFs launching for Ethereum. If you follow me on X, you will know that I don’t believe those are going to all be spot ETFs. Some are going to be collections of LSTs for the yield. But somebody has to manage those collections for TradFi, automatically. Maybe it might be us, who knows?
But LSTs are, I would say, our only asset management ambition. We’re not interested in managing any other kind of DeFi. We’re not interested in managing any other kind of asset. But if our Keepers are running on a network, earning the native token, and they want to stake for yield via an LST, which, of course, why not? We’re going to be there and we’re going to be doing it as a Community, using our own tools.
Vasily: So, Gordon, I think that our time is finishing for this AMA. Do we have any other questions or anything that the Community wants to ask us? I think that we covered a lot of topics, including all the PowerPool activities last month, all the conferences, all the onboarding process, validators, Keepers, and Gnosis Chain mainnet. All this, all the insight into our future go-to-market strategy and how we see the competition between different automation networks.
I think this was really useful because I think the majority of our audience doesn’t understand the automation market and doesn’t understand how it works and what PowerPool wants to achieve in this market.
Gordon: I don’t see any other questions in the queue, but I can’t see comments on X on my phone necessarily. Do we have anything else coming in? Does anybody want to ask a question? Oh, come on, guys, somebody must have a question.
Vasily: I think if not, that we can wrap up this AMA. The main point today is that we are going to the Gnosis Chain mainnet, where we are onboarding Keepers. If you are a Gnosis Chain validator or you want to be a Gnosis Chain validator, come to us. We will help you to install everything and be a Keeper. This invitation is mainly for the existing validators because for existing validators, it’s very simple and not time-consuming to join.
But we also will provide a node-runner grant for all users who successfully pass the testnet on Gnosis Chain. You will receive the token package for staking for free from the PowerPool Treasury. So you don’t need to buy anything. You just need to participate and be active and receive all the benefits associated with that. Some new materials will be released, I think, today or tomorrow regarding the onboarding process.
Gordon: OK, well, thank you, Vasily, and thank you to our Community Manager for organizing these spaces. Visit us on our Discord, ask questions, also Telegram. There are Turkish and Russian language Telegram channels. We would like to have even more language channels. Particularly Chinese, if any of you out there are Chinese speakers. Thank you for attending our session.
