Warp: Powering the Future of Automation

Warp’s decentralized and generalizable event handling protocol, which is now open-source and live on testnet, unlocks a whole new world of possibilities for the Terra ecosystem and beyond. Through the magic of Warp, protocols and users can queue any type of transaction to be executed automatically in the future based on any available on-chain data. The transactions are called jobs, and the circumstances under which they become executable are called the conditions. When conditions are met, a job can be executed by anyone in the community, in exchange for that job’s reward.

Warp thus offers a decentralized marketplace that connects job creators (protocols and users) with job executors (keepers).

In the Warp economy, protocols save themselves time and money in the process of automating functionality, users gain flexibility and autonomy over what they can accomplish on-chain, and keepers earn consistent rewards from executing jobs — it’s a win-win-win.

In this article, we’ll outline some of Warp’s key functionalities and how they can be used to power the next generation of decentralized protocols.

Warp’s Advanced SDK: A Powerful New Tool in Developers’ Tool Belts

Warp’s advanced SDK introduces a novel way to enhance smart contract functionality. Using just a few lines of code, a developer can easily import Warp’s decentralized automation functionality right into the frontend or backend of their dApp.

The SDK has full feature parity with Warp’s smart contracts, which offer essential functionality such as creating, executing, and querying jobs, all the way to more advanced functionality like chained job creation and local condition resolution.

Decentralized Automation: Making Protocols More Efficient and Effective

Historically, on-chain protocol automation has required custom-built bots run on centralized, dedicated infrastructure. While functional, this approach is time and resource intensive, centralized, and exposed to the risk of bots going down for one reason or another.

Warp handles automation differently: users pre-sign transactions, specify the conditions under which they should be executed, and include a reward for execution. Once a job’s conditions are met, any one of the keepers in Warp’s ecosystem can execute it and claim the reward.

By enabling automation in this way, Warp eliminates the risk and costs associated with bots going down, outsources the time and resources of creating a bot from protocols to keepers, and removes the centralization vector, ultimately making protocols that integrate Warp more efficient, more effective, and more decentralized.

Customizable Jobs: Adjustable to Fit Protocol Needs

By design, Warp is fully customizable and scalable. Jobs can be composed of any transaction, or group of transactions, organized in an atomic list-form. These can be simple in nature, such as sending a transaction, or complex and recursive, whereby a job message is made up of multiple transactions and jobs. Here, instead of creating separate jobs in sequence after each one has been executed, a job creator can chain them to create a series of complex transactions executed from a single message.

Complex Conditions: Unlimited On-Chain Potential

Likewise, conditions can consist of any circumstance the job creator can imagine. Warp conditions offer the same capabilities as if-statements in modern programming languages. If a creator wanted a transaction to occur after 9:00 am on Wednesday, they could simply use a time expression, which specifies the time they desire the job to be executed.

Expressions can also evaluate to the value of a query message response, allowing any on-chain value to be compared and evaluated. Conditions can be simple and set to be evaluated as “true” or “false”, or chained and nested using “And,” “Or,” and “not” boolean operators to create even more specific and complex circumstances under which a transaction should be executed.

Theoretically, any condition can be specified using the boolean and math operators provided by Warp.

For a hands-on explanation of conditions, check out this example from the Warp docs.

Permissionless Execution: Lowering the Cost of Automation

Anyone who executes a Warp job is known as a keeper. When jobs are created, they are put into a queue, ordered from highest to lowest reward. Keepers search through the queue and look for any jobs whose conditions have been met. As long as the conditions specified in a given job are met, anyone can execute the job, earning the reward specified by the job creator.

This permissionless execution environment lowers the cost of automation for protocols, as it’s free to integrate Warp, and the gas fees and rewards payable to keepers can be paid for by users. Without Warp, protocols can get stuck paying for developer hours to build and maintain automation bots, as well as centralized server fees from companies like AWS.

Join the Warp Community ☄️

Warp is revolutionizing automation on Terra and beyond. Join the Warp community to stay apprised with the latest developments, including the release of our upcoming roadmap!

• Follow @warp_protocol on Twitter
• Follow @warp_protocol on Medium
• Join the Warp Discord
• Join the Warp Telegram group
• Read the Docs