PowerPool Community Call #4 RECAP- November 28, 2023
PowerPool has completed its 4th Community Call AMA and discussed:
- ETHGlobal Istanbul insights
- PowerPool Hackathon — DeFi Automation
- PowerAgent v2 Testnet updates
- Gnosis Chain Launch
- PowerPool Grants Programs
- PowerPool 2024 RoadMap
If you missed the call, we’ve prepared this recap article for you.
Spaces recording: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1eaKbgoBoanGX
PowerPool Speakers:
Gordon Gekko — Chief Strategist @GordonGekko_CVP
Vasily Sumanov — Director of Research @Vasily_Sumanov
Recap:
Gordon: Okay, so while we were waiting, that was a brief overview of the AMA format and the outline for today’s discussion. Vasily led the PowerPool delegation in Istanbul, so he will be doing most of the talking today. So Vasily, why don’t you just take us into what happened at ETH Global and DevConnect in Istanbul?
Insights from Devconnect and ETHGlobal in Istanbul
Vasily: Well, yes we have a strong team, and we participated in the hackathon. We were also a hackathon sponsoring team, so we attended the majority of the events in Istanbul. So it was, I can say, quite a packed week there. We attended, I think, all the account abstraction events, ZK, rollups, etc. So it was quite a packed week in Istanbul.
I think the key thing that we did there was our hackathon. We partnered with Gnosis Chain and participated in their hackathon under the ‘umbrella’ of Gnosis Chain. We sponsored an automation sub-section with the Gnosis Chain hackathon, and we provided prizes in PowerPool $CVP native tokens for our hackathon winners. Our section was the only section of the hackathon that was focused purely on automation and asked participants to code something automated by our PowerAgent Keeper network. As sponsors of the Gnosis Chain automation track, we were focused mainly on the Gnosis Chain automation solutions, since the PowerAgent Automation Network has already been deployed there for around one month. For the hackathon, we had 30–40 Keepers live on the Gnosis Chain network, so it was quite a reliably operating network.
We had several applications built during the hackathon and finally, we awarded two prizes, paid as $CVP for a value of 2k and 1.5k USD, to two projects that built something on top of PowerAgent. I will share the information about the winner, of the best automation project from the hackathon using PowerAgent so far.
The winning project was called YieldNest, and it was created by Amadeo Brands and his teammates. They built a DCA, dollar cost average strategy on Gnosis Chain that can automatically buy tokens regularly. So, assume that somebody wants to buy, for example, ETH or some other tokens for DAI every hour or every day. There can be different approaches for that, but the main idea is that you are frequently buying an asset, like small portions of an asset, and of course, DCA is one of the best use cases for automation because nobody wants to manually trigger the button and sign transactions in Metamask every few hours. Since Gnosis Chain is a very low-fee network, even if you make 20 transactions per day, you will spend almost nothing on gas. So DCA with YieldNest on Gnosis Chain was a fairly good automation use case. And the YieldNest developers also made some connections with Gearbox, another one of our partners.
So our hackathon outcome was quite good. It was good not only because some people learned about PowerPool and PowerAgent, started to build, and started to explore, but we also held a lot of really insightful conversations at our hackathon booth. The booth is the place where our hackathon mentors were sitting and helping people understand how PowerAgent works, to learn how to build on top of it. There was also good communication with several other projects. For example, we had quite good talks with Metamask regarding a Snap implementation. A Snap is like a module inside Metamask. Using Snaps, it should be possible to set up automated actions like limit orders or a DCA strategy or something like that directly from Metamask. In this case, an end user would not need to go to the PowerAgent website. And they would not need to do any kind of coding, deployment, anything. Just use Metamask and they can use PowerAgent from there and get access to several simple templates, limit orders, DCA, or something else.
In total, there were more than 20 different projects we met with and many quite interesting people that we talked to about PowerPool and made some plans for collaboration. We talked with StarkNet, we talked with Gearbox. Our main goal now is to start delivering on all these collaboration opportunities. I also had quite good conversations with the engineering community that I’m part of and with some podcasts and newsletters regarding building more brand awareness for PowerPool and finding more information distribution opportunities as well. We also had good discussions with some L2 roll-ups and we will discuss L2 roll-ups a lot more in the Roadmap section below.
Regarding our Istanbul findings overall, I want to summarize with a couple of thoughts here. First of all, we had quite deep discussions on automation and nobody cut it short saying, ‘Oh, we are set up, we don’t need any other solution’. No one said, ‘It’s fine, we’re using Chainlink or we’re using something else. Nobody said that to me. So it means that some people, although they’re currently using Chainlink, or some projects are using Gelato, there were different opinions on the experience of using these two projects for automation purposes. So almost every project that needs automation, they are open to using something else or trying to get rid of their centralized keeper bots by substituting with our PowerAgent network. There is a sense that automation is something that’s needed for chains, for protocols, and individuals. So we will have a lot of discussions in play after this Istanbul conference. We are going forward to integrate with as many of these new projects as possible.
The second point is that over the last few months, and continuing, we are very focussed on Keeper network growth. We are currently live with about 46 Gnosis Chain validators/Keepers active right now. So it’s not bad. But of course, we want a lot more Keepers. We want to spread to different chains and recruit many more Keepers on each chain to join the PowerAgent network.
However, we are seeing that the key infrastructure piece for increasing Keeper numbers is the RPC. Since we cannot use centralized RPCs, we are focusing more on decentralized RPCs. So we put a lot of effort into finding more new decentralized RPC projects. We found DRPC, Fluence, Gateway.fm, and some others. We are now testing our Keeper separation with these RPC projects to see how it works. If these tests go well, these RPCs should be much more reliable than centralized RPCs, including all the best-known ones. So we can then also provide opportunities to PowerAgent Keepers to use these decentralized RPCs because, for example, on Polygon, you need five terabytes of SSD for running the Polygon node and it’s quite expensive. It’s not possible to be run by ordinary people at all.
We try to be as far as possible from centralized RPCs, I mean, in a wide meaning. But of course, somebody can privately use a centralized RPC for running a PowerAgent Keeper and nobody in PowerPool will know that. But on a network scale, we will try to get the majority of our PowerPool Keeper nodes using their own RPCs, their own validator nodes, or decentralized RPC solutions with proven reliability and a good history of operation. This is also one of the important points to lower the barrier to the adoption of PowerAgent Keeper nodes running on chains with huge nodes, like Polygon and BNB Chain. These two chains can be good markets for automation because the fees are low, there are a lot of projects, a lot of necessity for automation, but at the same time, it’s quite expensive and quite complicated to run your own RPC on these chains. So this is also good news for PowerPool that more decentralized infrastructure for Ethereum, for Keepers, for all this kind of stuff is now emerging and growing a lot.
We think that going forward we will really focus on chain partnerships and project hackathons and onboarding developers using these hackathons because it’s one of the best options to get direct access to people, to share all the knowledge, and help them to build on top of PowerAgent. I will share more learnings from the conference in the Roadmap section below. Because we try to apply all our learnings to our Roadmap.
So the Ethereum Global DevConnect in Istanbul was amazing and we learned a lot, a lot of new knowledge. And I hope many new partnerships will soon be set up, with all the proper announcements done.
PowerPool’s Roadmap for 2024
Vasily: So let’s move on to the Roadmap. We decided to publish the Roadmap now, and not as it’s usually done at the end of December when everybody’s busy and nobody has time to read the Roadmap. Since the Roadmap is quite important, with the next steps and milestones for the project, we decided to focus on the Roadmap a little bit in advance of the New Year to better share it with the Community and make proper planning for all of these.
So our first learning from preparing the launch of PowerAgent v2 in Istanbul is that using L1/L2 ecosystem partnerships and joint hackathons like we did with Gnosis Chain are key to driving PowerAgent adoption. PowerAgent is an Ancillary Service Network, a supplementary network supplying automation that greatly increases the utility and value of its underlying L1 Ledgers or L2 Scaling Layers. It’s an additional chain feature or service that every EVM-compatible chain and roll-up needs. So the best pathway to onboard new projects and Keepers and gain adoption is to partner with each chain ecosystem. Since almost every ecosystem has regular hackathons, we plan to continue to co-sponsor and participate in chain and project ecosystem hackathons, as we did with Gnosis Chain in Istanbul to generate more options for onboarding developers and Keepers by meeting the new rollups, discussing with the teams, and making Telegram groups. I think that we made more than maybe 50 Telegram groups throughout the event.
Gordon: Yeah, I think that’s really exciting. And I can say from the point of view of the overall crypto market, it’s only just now sinking into people that an EVM L1 Ledger or an L2 Scaling Layer on its own is a fairly useless thing without service networks, which can be called ‘infrastructure’, but really are best called Ancillary Service Networks or ASNs. For example, oracle networks add a lot of value to underlying chains — you can’t get off-chain data without an oracle network. But the same is true of automation services because smart contracts are not protagonists, they can’t initiate actions, either chronologically or based on events or off-chain computation. EVM contracts just can’t execute themselves, acting alone as protagonists. So that means suddenly everybody realizes that all EVM L1 Ledgers and L2 Scaling Layer chains NEED at least one automation chain as a partner. And, you know, this is why the chains are welcoming us as partners.
And we’re one of the few good partners because there are very few other projects focussing on just automation and off-chain computing. We are a powerful addition to any EVM chain ecosystem. Because with all the different L1s, and there are too many L1s already, there’s also too many L2s, and there’s going to be even more L2s and AppChains in the coming years. So availability of automation services will increasingly become a point of competitive differentiation for all these EVM L1s and L2s. Builders will start to ask ‘Who has the best automation partner’? This was the basis for our initial existing partnership with Gnosis Chain, who have the same vision we do of high levels of automation powered by PowerAgent, and also the reason we expect many other ecosystem partnerships will soon materialize across many major EVM L1s and L2s.
Obviously, Chainlink is also in the game. Chainlink has some advantages over us when it comes to providing automation as part of a broad range of services on private TradFi-only chains. But in the public chain arena, we think that Chainlink automation services will be too heavy, expensive, and complicated for many protocols and certainly end users who just need automation services rather than all the other services Chainlink can provide.
And so this Istanbul feedback of general chain/layer interest in automation was, I think, very positive news because it confirms that EVM L1s and L2s are now really incentivized to partner with us. We’re in a different, more focused category from Chainlink when it comes to being attractive as public L1 or L2 partners and hackathon co-sponsors. And as Vasily said, from talking to the chains in Istanbul, everybody thinks this is obvious now. But I can tell you that 2 years ago when work began on PowerAgent v2, almost no one else was focussed on automation. There really are only 3 automation solutions on the market, and for most markets, that is enough. Chainlink, Gelato, and ourselves are all offering different approaches, and if we execute our Roadmap well, I do not think there will be many more significant players in the automation space.
Multi-chain deployment
Vasily: Yep. So this is why we are aiming to be deployed in 2024 on Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Scroll, and BNB Chain. Besides Gnosis Chain which is already live, and Ethereum which is live in the testing phase. We are now almost ready to start onboarding mainnet Ethereum validators as Keepers. The Ethereum mainnet contract is deployed. We are testing it with some Keepers that were launched by the team. There are now three or four Keepers, maybe there will be five of them. We are testing different decentralized RPCs and different Ethereum clients for RPCs. So it’s still primarily technical testing.
So yeah, as I said before, after the Ethereum mainnet we plan roll-outs on Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Scroll, BNB, and NeonEVM because Neon EVM is the key gateway to Solana ecosystems. Since Neon is EVM compatible, it’s not a big deal to deploy there. Of course, for deployment on those EVM chains that do not run Ethereum post consensus, like NeonEVM, we first need some Randao source of randomness development that is in the Roadmap. The current PowerAgent contract is easy to deploy on Ethereum, Sepolia, and Gnosis Chain because they all have similar consensus mechanisms. But for other rollups and chains, deployments will be modified with our own portable source of randomness, needed because PowerAgent v2 Keepers are selected randomly, unlike Keepers in some other networks.
So the first point of the Roadmap is sequential deployment on several leading EVM L1/L2 chains. Each will be a huge milestone. For deployment on Polygon, for example, we not only need to deploy a contract and develop a source of randomness, make the audits, and be sure the nodes work properly, but we also need to make major testing by the team of launching different decentralized RPCs, checking out the different versions of node clients, etc, etc. For example, we found out during Gnosis Chain deployment, that different Nethermind versions work differently. And each new chain deployment is like a big dark forest of RPCs. It’s like when you work with physical nodes, it’s much more complicated than just on-chain contracts.
Also, we also need to explore the MEV protection solutions, for example, with CoWSwap, and their MEV blocker. It’s like an RPC where you can just use it as an RPC and send all your transactions there and it will be protected from MEV. However different chains have different MEV protection tools and different MEV mechanisms. And MEV management is very important because if PowerAgent aims to handle limit orders, the DCA, this all kinds of trading stuff for users, we need to have MEV protection options there, or users’ tasks can be blocked by the MEV bots. So MEV protection must be included in our considerations for each chain because we need to work a lot on the protection of user actions so their jobs cannot be blocked by the MEV bots.
Gordon: I have a question or an observation here regarding which chains are the best partners. If you look at BNB Chain, everybody knows their validators require absolutely massive hardware. I think they have less than 30 validators in total. But our PowerPool strategy is focused on the home staker, the small validator, running low-cost hardware, who wants to earn extra, passive income in various native tokens. So the issue is how do we launch enough decentralized Keepers on heavy-hardware chains? For example, BNB Chain has a massive customer base and TVL, they will be a big and important chain, and in terms of decentralization and L2s, they are moving closer to certain aspects of Ethereum. But it’s going to be a long time before small-scale Keepers can put PowerAgent on a full BNB validator node. So I think the question is, how do we recruit Keeper validators running on BNB Chain?
Vasily: Yep. We’re not going to expect our Keeper nodes to run their own BNB validators. I think it’s not possible. But if there is a chance to make some kind of partnership with some BNB Chain validators, for example, those running BNB liquid staking solutions that also run their own validators. So it means that there is a chance to partner with them and ask them to also run PowerAgent v2 on BNB Chain and earn more BNB. So we will try to do that. But of course, we understand that, you know, the BNB ecosystem is still very centralized and we have quite a low number of validators to whom we can reach out. So I think that for us, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism will be the near-term priority for PowerPool.
Gordon: Well, there’s another option for BNB validators, which is THORChain. THORChain nodes all also run BNB validators. It’s a liquidity service chain, another example of an Ancillary Services Chain. It’s a Liquidity Network, a cross-chain liquidity market maker. They want to become more like a centralized exchange. But they don’t have limit orders or any other CEX-like services because they do not have automation. I mean, every THORChain node runner also runs about 8–9 chain validators that mostly could also run PowerAgent, so in theory they could run Keepers on every EVM chain they support, which is about five. So they could use PowerPool as an automation partner and their node runners all already run BNB Chain validators. I think it’s a very good potential partnership, but we need to get some contacts. I also think THORChain would be a valuable partnership, even if it wasn’t for the BNB Chain angle. But the only way I see us getting a significant Keeper footprint on BNB is with some combination of LST and THORChain node operators. I’ve been trying on X to reach out, but we just don’t yet have any contacts with THORChain.
Vasily: Yep, I think this is an option. So I just recorded this idea to my to-do section to let us know what is on there. So yeah, on to the second part of the Roadmap.
Ecosystem growth and grants provision
So the first Roadmap part was this multi-chain EVM L1/L2 deployment and expansion plan. The second part of our Roadmap is ecosystem growth. So as I said before, we plan to establish chain partnerships with L1 and L2 ecosystems like Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Scroll, and some other ones. So that means a series of continuing hackathon participation events, information distribution, and some co-marketing and grants provision there. We aim to utilize all the options that these chain partnerships can provide to us and of course, provide something in return. So we have our own project that is focused on continuing grant provision to attract more developers and Keepers.
So far, we’re not asking for funding from these chain ecosystems. Of course, if there are some grant programs or something that we can participate in, I think we can apply as PowerPool DAO, maybe to get some support for more developers. But you know, our main intention is not to get money from these chain ecosystems but instead to provide our own grants for the projects that will build something on top of each chain using PowerAgent automation. That will be our contribution to each rollup economy as well. So we are not taking away from our partner chains, rather we are trying to give more there and make some synergy. So also we plan to do some marketing activity and will also launch a chain-by-chain PowerPool Ambassadors program for each ecosystem.
PowerAgent Templates program
But beyond hackathons, our own Ecosystem Grants Program will be focussed on our PowerAgent Templates program for developers. So what does that mean? Well, when PowerPool v2 was first deployed in Sepolia testnet, the first months of testnet, a Job Owner needed to write custom code. Each Job Owner needed to code their own automation job, deploy it to the network, add it to the Keepers task list to get executed, etc. So the first time things are done, it looks extremely complicated and a demanding project not possible for anyone besides very sophisticated users or protocol builders.
But besides protocols, PowerPool also believes that even ordinary users, retail, and B2C use cases need automation of simple routine tasks; limit orders, DCAs, liquidation protections, all this kind of stuff. So, the best option to attract ever more developers to service retail and B2C is to provide a collection of pre-developed Templates, available in a PowerAgent ‘app store’ on the PowerPool website where you can just access a previously-developed Template and make a one-click action like ‘I want to set up a limit order’. You click it, you set it up, and it is automatically deployed from some smart contract factory, or it uses something else. There are many different technical implementations of how, for example, limit orders can work, the smart contract factory, or, you know, some account abstraction option, or something like that.
So our vision is that in the near future, I mean like next year, we will have the PowerAgent automation Template ‘AppStore’ and even retail DeFi users can use it easily. They won’t need to code, and this should boost PowerPool brand awareness and our end user base by adding a lot of retail clients who have maybe only, $50 on Gnosis Chain or BNB Chain, but if one-click Templates are deployed for say, BNB Chain, retail can use PowerAgent for some simple trading, some yield harvesting, and other options for individuals.
So, the PowerAgent Template development program will be very important. First of all, we can provide small grants, like maybe 2k, 3k, maybe a maximum of 5k grants from the DAO, for Template builders, because building a Template is much, much easier than building a protocol integration, or some complicated standalone product. You’re just building (or extending) a simple Template already integrated into PowerAgent. We already have a list of such Templates, examples of little products that should be built on top of PowerAgent. We made the list for the Gnosis Chain hackathon, and I think that we will publish this Template ideas list with all the details, already done by the research team in Notion.
We think that the PowerAgent automation Template grants program can become really huge, extending across many different chains, roll-ups, or ecosystems, where users and contributors can use or extend Templates that are already developed. For example, if you have a Template for limit order on Uniswap v2, you can easily use it on different chains where Uniswap v2 forks are deployed, or if you have a Uniswap v3 limit order template, I think it’s not significantly different from Uniswap v2, to be honest. You can also use it on all chains where Uniswap v3 is available, right? The same can be applied to Templates for Balancer, or Aave, whichever forks are officially deployed; these protocols can be found on almost every adopted chain with some considerable TVL. So once there is a PowerAgent Template, it can be used not only on Gnosis Chain or Ethereum but also across a much bigger cross-chain audience.
So the PowerAgent Automation Template program is a very important piece of news that I want to share with you and we are focussed on it. If you have some ideas for automation Templates, even if you’re not a developer, but just a DeFi user who has a recurring task like a payment and needs to automate it and doesn’t have a solution, you can share your Template idea on the PowerPool Discord chat or DM on Twitter, to me or the official PowerPool account. We will think about how we can develop it with our team, provide a grant, or make some announcement that we are searching for contributors to make this Template available.
Core protocol development
The next big section in the Roadmap is core protocol development. First of all, analytics. There will be a lot of data analytics done because if PowerAgent is running on a lot of chains, we need to have all the analytics for each chain, and then we can further develop our protocol according to chain data captured. So if we see some issues or users that need a new type of feature or we need to rework something due to the on-chain data that we can prove with the demand, we can change it.
And then adding all the support for third-party Template jobs, as I said before, but also the RandDAO contract, which provides a source of randomness on chains not using the Ethereum POS consensus. We will need our own source of randomness for deployment on Optimism, on Arbitrum or Neon EVM, and on some other chains like BNB Chain.
And then also the Node upgrades and then also a big additional piece of news for PowerPool is that we plan to make a PowerPool safety module. This would act as an insurance fund covering Job Owners against the malicious Keeper behavior. This is still in the R&D stage right now. We’re not yet developing it. We’re mostly researching and testing stuff around it. But the idea is that tokens slashed from Keepers can be collected into an insurance fund and used to cover some losses or in case of no execution if some of the Keepers failed or something like that. Also, it can be additionally funded by some reward.
So I think that some kind of Job Owner protection can be really interesting for users and protocols because no Keeper network on the market currently offers that even in theory. At this moment, I don’t know any.
Gordon: I agree. It’s a good selling point. I mean, Chainlink certainly doesn’t offer it. And in fact, other automation chains don’t even slash. Gelato just has some kind of internal off-chain discipline via whitelisting or blacklisting permissioned nodes. So it’s consistent with our message that PowerAgent is an automation chain that has ‘skin in the game’ and is trustworthy for that reason.
Vasily: Other protocol improvements on the Roadmap tech improvements likely to be developed are off-chain resolvers both with ZK proofs and without ZK proofs. So there will be a future possibility to execute jobs with some off-chain computations and use some off-chain data for operation. When developed, these solutions may use some external APIs. But of course, these APIs are not going to be under PowerPool ownership or control.
So they’re not owners of these APIs, like Enzo API, but they look reliable. So some Job Owners who think that these APIs are reliable and want to work with them, they can, in the future. They will be able to work with them and this ZK-enabled off-chain computing can provide a lot of new possibilities for job creation. So, for example, if an end user wants to create their job and not expose other users to these external API risks, I’m not too worried about that.
But when I talk about the external APIs, we don’t yet have a way to control for some risk of failure or of some incorrect data coming from this API. So it means that if there is some centralized source of data via API, and we are not responsible for this data, we just need to warn our users that you will be able to use it based on our architecture if you want. Of course, it’s not mandatory at all. And in the future, with ZK proofs, it can become decentralized, and be much safer for this type of job creation.
So ZK proofs are also in the Roadmap. When they are delivered, I think it will be a very big step forward for PowerPool because our competitors offering web functions or web actions as they are named, according to my knowledge, none of them have the ZK proof of chain computations in production that can be used by anyone at this moment. So ZK proofs can be a really big competitive point for PowerPool.
We also plan to further develop the explorer, the subgraph, and the PowerAgent interface, because if you go to the PowerPool website in the PowerAgent network section, you will find a lot of data about the Keepers, the transactions executed, how many Keepers are in each network, how many tasks were executed, how much gas has been compensated, etc. All the statistics are there, in addition to the analysis that we also support, of course.
Gordon: In terms of the future market for automation, you know, nobody really knows how big the market is going to be, but almost every solution nowadays for identity, on-chain identity, is migrating towards ZK proof identities, and what that means is that even routine transactions in future are going to feature identity checks and ZK proofs, and nobody’s going to do that manually. That’s all got to be automated. So it’s a very interesting sub-segment of the automation market, just to do with checking identities, and not just of people, but also data/content markets with digital rights management and even AI-related billing services.
Research
Vasily: Yep. So the final section in the Roadmap is the research roadmap. Since I’m leading the Research team, this is the most native point for me to discuss. So the first point is that research will continuously upgrade the parameters of the PowerAgent crypto-economic model, and this is quite important because different chains have different fee dynamics. Some chains have bigger tips, for example than the base fee, so the gas compensation formula and gas compensation principles should be a little bit different on different chains to fully cover the Keepers’ expenses.
Also, the Keepers’ potential income on different chains can vary a lot, and some slashing mechanics can be upgraded. Any kind of decentralized protocol is a continuously evolving system, so we will use all the data that is available on-chain to track the performance of the network, how tasks are executed, and whether there are any problems or not. We also look at slashing if there are some losses in case of no execution, how many tokens should be slashed from which Keepers, and all these crypto-economic parameters can be fine-tuned and upgraded in the future. This is the Research group’s ongoing analytical job, like a feedback loop, where we analyze all the on-chain data, what is going on in the network, and the results of our operations, and after that, we can possibly upgrade some crypto-economic parameters. If there should be significant changes made to key parameters, possibly it should be submitted to the DAO.
So this is already a big set of tasks to be done in the coming year. The immediate next task is to establish all these analytic sources, it’s Dune Analytics, and also Explorer, and all the related stuff that needs to be done to make data available as fast as possible and in a convenient form for working with it. This next task also includes some research regarding key protocols and architecture. For example, if we want to make a template for Aave, we need to understand how Aave works, if we want to make a template for Uniswap, we need to understand how Uniswap works.
There are a lot of new protocols coming to the market. For example, on Arbitrum, GMX is one of the most used protocols so far. I had some discussions in Istanbul regarding automation for GMX trading, so I’m also making some DCA there, making some stop losses there, I mean, they do have some features with stop losses that take profit orders, but some users want to make it through the job, for example, so all of this requires to understand how each protocol works and possibly some PowerAgent automation primitives or Templates can result from this research. This can be quite interesting, because it’s like a combination of market research to understand what’s demanded by the market, and technical research to understand how protocols work, what functions are called, what parameters are there, what should be the execution conditions, because any proper job creation involves a lot of information to be understood, maybe even some backtesting in Python with some real or synthetic data for that.
There is also a need for ongoing market-driven research regarding options to deploy PowerAgent automation given likely levels of automation demand, because, for example, if there are new projects like Base Chain or some other roll-up like the brand new Blast, a roll-up that’s also looking to be huge, possibly in the future, we should track it, and understand where to deploy Keeper nodes as the next step to onboard Keepers from them, Keepers onboarding campaigns, etc. So these tasks also fall under the research team department's control.
The next point is the grants provision and assessment and the control of the execution, because, like, every grant provided requires also research, understanding what is proposed, how it should work, is it possible to do or not, some, you know, some consulting for this, like, technical, you know, consulting and support for all these grants, you know, projects, and also control the execution, checking the milestones, you know, is it already delivered or not, unblocking the next milestone payment, and these kinds of tasks.
Also, the protocol integration, new automation primitives, and searching and integrating some building blocks, because, you know, all the DeFi and all the Web3 is based on the composability, nobody can develop everything, but composability means that nobody needs to develop everything. When building something protocol developers and users should understand what is already on the market, and if, for example, some other protocol has already made some reliable solution that is audited and working well, you can use it as a building block for some part of the product, of course, maybe not for the core functionality, but for some additional less-differentiated parts of the code. RPCs are a good example, because solving the RPC problem for chains with huge nodes can easily, you know, lower the barrier for Keepers onboarding.
The last point in the research roadmap is our original academic research related to the Keeper selection algorithms, staking, slashing, MEV protection, and ZK stuff. It’s a quite broad definition, but we have already published one article available on GitHub on Keeper selection approaches, and we have more to come. I hope that in the coming year, we will deliver more academic-grade materials regarding automation functionality use cases, some mechanism design, and possibly some ZK proofs for the resolvers and these types of topics. We cannot make any kind of firm commitment, because academic research is something that you can deliver, but no academic journal will accept it, or it can be quite long for the peer review, or something else. But anyway, we want to make a considerable step forward in the research and try to get known not only for empirical data analysis but also for some theoretical analysis on different concepts, mathematics, etc.
This Roadmap is approximate but broadly this is what we want to do and what we will try to do, but it can vary depending on the market conditions and opportunities arising. Tomorrow we could get 10 projects that want to integrate PowerAgent, and we will have to divert more focus to integration of these 10 projects as clients of the DAO, and showcase this automation, rather than doing some academic research. So it depends a lot on what will happen in the market.
So, in summary, the new chain deployment, hackathons, ecosystem partnerships, some developments, research, and new functions to the protocol, but key targets are the onboarding of new projects, and users, and these extensible Templates should help us a lot to onboard, and the Keeper nodes as well. I think that the Roadmap overview, I have finished with this. But if you have some questions, you should ask questions, and I will be really happy to answer them, but I understand that this is a lot of information in a very short time.
Gordon: We have received one question about all the code and UI updates, and I’ve pointed the questioner to the Medium document, which has a couple of pages on UI and code updates, and asked what specific functionalities they’re wondering about, because to go through all the V2 updates, even the most recent updates to V2 code, it’s a little bit much to try to do that on an X space, so it’s better to look at the Medium documents, all of which are published, and accessible from the project Wiki, to see a complete overview of all of our AMA sessions, and also all of the Medium publications, so it’s really…
Vasily: Yeah, I need to mention one more thing, so one important update that will be delivered soon is account abstraction. We provided a grant to the Partitura project that, as far as I know, already built a module for Safe, for the Gnosis Safe, that you can use Partitura Gnosis Safe with automation through the account abstraction. Possibly we will implement some more support for account abstraction because account abstraction is a major trend in DeFi and Web3 in general, and I think that in the future, a lot of users will have this account abstraction, and accounts that will be signed by the network from other sites, so…
PowerAgent on Gnosis Chain
Gordon: We had another question about Gnosis Chain, and just to reiterate, Gnosis Chain is sort of like a pre-launch for Ethereum mainnet, in the sense that it’s a much cheaper chain to run and test on. We have a shared vision with Gnosis about the importance of automation, and we have their Safe Wallet type integrations that Vasily just mentioned. Gnosis has a very large validator community because obviously, you don’t need 32 ETH to stake a validator in Gnosis, so we’re tapping into that large validator community and saying, okay, not only do you want to be a PowerAgent Keeper on Gnosis, but let’s look at taking you to some other chains as well, even with your inexpensive hardware. Also as a testing site for Ethereum, Gnosis was by far the most logical place for us to start, but obviously, as you know from the Roadmap, we’re going to end up on almost every EVM chain.
Vasily: Yep, and I think that Gnosis is a quite good playground for developers because you can find the Uniswap v2 forks, you can find Agave, which is Aave v2 fork, so you can find there a bunch of some protocols and forks, and also some original developments as well, and also there is sDAI, which is also quite interesting from the TVL, so there can be some users that are just built on top of it. So if anyone wants to check their job or their template or some protocol integration in a real on-chain environment, you can use the Gnosis Chain and pay almost nothing in terms of gas costs for all this testing. You can deploy 10–20 jobs, see how it works and change some parameters there, so yeah, any development is an ongoing process, you cannot make it once and work from scratch, it’s almost not possible in real development. Gnosis Chain is a perfect live sandbox for starting something new in terms of development and protocol.
Gordon: Did you want to talk about anything else in terms of code and UI updates, or should we move on to testnet stats?
PowerAgent V2 testnet updates
Vasily: I think the testnet stats, yeah, because there were a lot of UI updates and some code updates of this were mentioned in the BWC update, so with all the details you can find it there, and you can also use the PowerPool website in the network and the Explorer to see how it works this Explorer, and all the statistics, how it’s displayed there, it’s a really convenient way to learn more about the state of the Sepolia testnet on the Gnosis Chain, and Ethereum is also there, so you can find Ethereum there, it’s already live, we didn’t start the onboarding campaign so far, we plan to do it in the coming days, most probably, because we’re checking different decentralized RPCs and execution clients, but anyway, yeah, it’s all there, and
If you’re running DAppNode, you also will be able to run a Keeper node on Ethereum, for example, on Sepolia. I will share some statistics with you, we have 36 Keepers and more than 1 million executions of the tasks deployed mainly by the testers, so as a team we also deployed some jobs to the network, but the majority of jobs were created by the testers, some of the jobs were really crazy, with really frequent executions, and sometimes it even results in some Keeper fails and slashing, but it was really useful to understand how it could work in real environments, this is why testnet are running, so to make some tests and some crazy stuff that is not possible on mainnet, because it will just cost a lot of gas, so we made a lot of considerable upgrades for the node software, based on some bugs and issues that we found over months there.
On Gnosis Chain now we have 29 active Keepers and the absolute majority of them are also Gnosis Chain validators, as far as I know, onboarded from Gnosis Chain, and of course we plan to focus more on Keepers onboarding, For now, 29 Keepers is okay, but our goal is to have maybe100 Keepers on Gnosis Chain for example, and on all the other chains as well, and for this purpose we plan to start making some more $CVP drops, like little airdrops for active node runners, so if you’re running a node on Gnosis Chain, you will be able to get a weekly $CVP airdrop on mainnet, so it means that you’re running a node on Gnosis Chain, but we will reward you with some $CVP tokens from the ecosystem fund that was voted by the DAO in summer, and you will get the real $CVP tokens on Ethereum that have liquidity, so it’s like real tokens that you can use, or you can just accumulate them for future staking or some governance purposes, and we’re already doing some airdrops on Sepolia, and as far as I know, we paid more than 30k USD equivalent of CVP to test everything on Sepolia, so all users who run the Sepolia nodes, they will be rewarded for their actions on Sepolia, and we plan to continuously reward them, because they are quite important for all the testing on Sepolia, because when we do some new versions of PowerAgent or new versions of PowerAgent node, we start to test again on Sepolia to get all the feedback and possible issues found there to upgrade both the Gnosis Chain mainnet and the Ethereum mainnet, and in the future all other mainnets with tested software that is bug-proofed on Sepolia at least. So if you have an idea to contribute to PowerPool, the easiest way to do it is just to run a Keeper node, you can just DM me or go to Discord or Telegram, and we will be happy to onboard you, help you to set up everything, and if you run everything properly, you will get these airdrops and get some compensation, at least for some servers that you rent, and that’s it. If you already host a validator node, you don’t need to spend any additional money for servers or for some other hardware or some cloud computing or something like that. It costs almost nothing to run PowerPool together with a validator node.
Gordon: Good. So in terms of testnets, as I understand it, Sepolia testnet will always be kept live as a way for people getting into Ethereum/EVM validation to have a risk-free testing environment. Do we have a view as to what would trigger the first actual Ethereum mainnet deployment for v2?
Vasily: So at this moment, our PowerAgent Keeper contract is already deployed on Ethereum mainnet, and we are testing it, as I said before, with different Ethereum clients and with some different decentralized RPCs, just to have an understanding of what works well, first of all, from this decentralized RPC point of view, and just test it out. I think in the coming days, we will roll out the official announcement and start onboarding Keepers to Ethereum mainnet, so yeah, it’s already live, but it’s using tCVP test tokens for now.
Why does it still use tCVP test tokens? Because in any kind of testing or if you are not an experienced node runner, for example, if you launch the Keeper, and you use some Infura or other free RPC for your Keeper because you just didn’t know that you need to use something else, since these RPCs are not reliable in terms of a lot of queries that you will do, you possibly can get out of the RPC one at some point of time and get slashed. So this is done just to protect you as a node runner from the slashing of real $CVP tokens, because real tokens cost real money, right? The test tokens are just test tokens that have no value, so we provide them from the TMultisig. These test tokens are from a separate contract from the original PowerPool token just for testing purposes, and if you run a node, you will get slashed multiple times, and you will lose some tCVP, but it will cost nothing because we just want to educate you how to run a node and to avoid all these simple mistakes that can result in your slashing.
When a Keeper is ready to start earning with real $CVP, they can use the fully mined contract. I think we will launch it before the end of the year, maybe in one or two weeks after we will onboard the first cohort of Keepers. We’ll see how that goes. The majority of them should work well without significant slashing. We will then deploy the Ethereum mainnet contract with real $CVP tokens and provide all the Keepers who have a good history of operation in PowerPool, who also run on Sepolia, who also run on Gnosis, and have demonstrated their contribution, as we promised before we will grant them the free $CVP stakes in real tokens for staking Keeper nodes.
From Istanbul and before there are a lot of partnership options with distributed RPC operations, so presumably the whole RPC-related slashing risk will diminish a lot in the future. We plan to work with these distributed or decentralized RPC projects to motivate their node runners because these decentralized RPC projects are also powered by node runners, right? They run nodes and that means that they can also run PowerAgent Keepers, right? So another one of our goals is to motivate these professional RPC node runners to also run PowerAgent Keepers.
Okay, so other than chain ecosystems, in terms of high-visibility partnerships, I think the highest-visibility project partner we have is Balancer. We made a joint limit order automation grant proposal published officially by the Balancer team and reposted by the official Balancer main account in X. This grant proposal is for developing automated limit orders for Balancer. We haven’t had any proper applications so far so if somebody wants to build a limit order PowerAgent Template for Balancer and get up to $20k for that, and then maybe extend it to other projects, it is not that complicated a task. I cannot say it is easily done because nothing in real production is easily done. But I think this is not extremely complicated. So if someone with the proper development skills wants to get a grant for $20k you can apply for this joint PowerPool-Balancer limit orders creation grant program. If your application is approved by the DAOs, you will get a grant of $20k.
Gordon: I think the theme here is that doing development integrating with PowerAgent is not the most challenging development, because you’re working with a lot of pre-existing code on all sides of the problem. It’s an ideal way to get grants and ride down the experience curve deploying code as Templates. In the future, as more and more developers start churning out these Templates, it’s a huge learning opportunity to look at Templates for other tasks and then generalize and extend them. So on the development side, I think that PowerPool needs to become known as a place to do developments and get grants without having a huge team or VC backing or anything like that. And you can learn a lot because you’re not immediately thrust into the deep end with a hundred million of TVL right behind you waiting to get hacked.
On the validator/Keeper side, I think it’s a similar story. Being a PowerAgent Keeper is not like being a THORChain node where you have to run nine validators including BNB Chain with validators so big that almost no one can run them. You can run PowerAgent Keepers on tiny bedroom hardware with virtually no risk as long as you’re aware that we do have ‘skin in the game’ and you can get slashed, but again PowerPool needs to be known as a place where people can go to get started. You don’t have to have a data center to be a PowerAgent Keeper. So somehow we need to get the word out that this is a place to go if you don’t have much money, you don’t have a big team. You don’t necessarily have that much experience, so what you’re looking for is where is the best start place to start. Which is the best community to join where you can learn the most? I think PowerPool is that option. You’re not going to get into ChainLink. You’re not going to get into a lot of these protocols that are running mission-critical TVL and stuff like that. But PowerPool is a permissionless DAO, so anyone can get started and contribute, maybe even with a grant.
Vasily: Yep. So I think that we can wrap up and finish this session because we are a little bit out of time and I think that we have shared the majority of the info that should be shared.
Gordon: I don’t see any other questions coming through on X comments. I don’t know, maybe the host has some questions? Yeah, I guess not. So as I said, we do have a 60-minute limit. So unless anybody has a question, there will be a transcript of this available online, just like there are transcripts of every other AMA. It’s all available on the PowerPool Wiki updates page. Feel free to spread this transcript via X and other social media to help get the message out that we need more Template developers, more node runner Keepers and you don’t need to be either the best or the richest or anything to get started in PowerPool. I think that’s our main message Yep.
Vasily: Yep. Yeah, so thank you, Gordon. I think that you will be sharing a massive pack of information here.
Gordon: Well, thank you everyone for listening. We will probably be having other Spaces sessions with partners in December and January, but the next general community AMA will probably be in February next year. By this time, PowerAgent will almost certainly be live also on Ethereum and people will begin asking what the hell is PowerPool?
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