“Can we orchestrate an attack on the bot ruining the fun in Gladiators KoC Grape tournament? @Andy_Tomb and myself took him for a fair few grape last night but he's restocked and we don't want to have to have that fight again on our own!”

Bot? Ruining the fun? Not on my watch!

For some context, Gladiator King of the Colosseum is a sort of game where you have to hold your position as “king of the Colosseum” straight for a time duration (3 hours for the GRAPE KoC).

Any player can just send a transaction, pay a small amount of GRAPE (currently 1.08 GRAPE) and become the new king, so you have to defend your position day and night, stopping others from winning the grand reward pool.

However, the fun was ruined when one person decided to build a bot to do this. People had to defend their positions against a bot that didn't need to sleep, eat, touch grass or take a break in any way. It just kept entering.

Game plan: Counter the bot WITH a bot

I brainstormed ideas with people in the #ama-live-chat channel. We had a game plan: outbot the bot, make them give up.

Idea 1

Build a Node.JS bot to watch transactions, test the bot, rent a VPS, maintain this VPS... nah. This idea got scrapped because it's just too much effort and too much cost to just fuck over a bot messing with a game.

So then what?

Eureka! Using Gelato Network to automate transactions

We thought a lot and talked a lot in the chat which we now moved to the top secret OG-only #og-chat. Suddenly, it came to me and I sent a message in the thread.

https://gelato.network/ can be used to outsource the execution of tasks, i believe it's reliable enough to be able to send a transaction within a 3 hour range

Gelato Network. It's a system of bots that send transactions at specific times or whenever possible. These automated transactions are incredibly important for this!

Now, I didn't have to code in JS with a blockchain library like ethers.js which I didn't know so well. I could just code in Solidity, a language I've gotten very accustomed to!

It worked on the first second try

The code is very simple, the logic is only about a hundred lines (the interfaces don't count of course) In fact, you can check it out here at this address: 0x34521c12104f8af6c5cfe139a107e6d7f49ebd7e

I then hooked it up to Gelato Network, so it would scan every block, check if my transaction would execute, then if it did, run it to go kick out that piece of sh enemy bot.

Currently it's at about 5 executions on Gelato (and one test execution to kick that bot out manually!) at the time of this writing. You can see them all in the Events tab on Snowtrace.

Grape go brrr! https://grapefinance.app

#defi #bots #autonomy #gelato #p2e

Autonomy Network

Autonomy Network is a system that allows smart contracts to queue Requests in the Registry contract, with a trigger (e.g. price of ABC goes above 500$). The system then, when the condition is met, calls the contract to do whatever it needs to do.

It works by a sort of Proof-of-Stake system. “Validators” (bots) can lock their AUTO (in the StakeManager contract) to get the exclusive right to execute Requests for a certain period of blocks.

In exchange, the smart contract has to pay enough ETH or AUTO to cover gas fees and a little extra to make it worthwhile for that validator.

Autonomy's PoS structure vs. “Free-for-all” incentives

Current ways of trying to achieve autonomous transactions is to incentivize bots to do it, for example, the compounding of an autocompounder.

This is like putting a small pile of money that is just about worthwhile for somebody to grab, so 100 bots will try and lunge for it before the other ones, and one random lucky bot will win the grand prize of... 5 cents after gas, probably, while everyone else fails.

This works, but is inefficient, prone to frontrunning and this free-for-all battle can make it not worthwhile for the bot, as there is a high chance of loss and a tiny chance of earning (and tiny earnings).

Frontrunners

Bots aren't instant, they have to pay for gas and their transactions will sit quietly in the memory pool. Generalized frontrunners can scan the memory pool and copy profitable transactions with a slightly higher gas price, and so the bots trying to grab the pile of money end up being outpaced by those frontrunners.

Inefficiency

For every lucky bot that succeeds, there are at least 5 more who fail. The model of a free-for-all means there can be only one.

The combination of all these factors causes bots to slowly become disincentivized as more bots join in, with extremely tiny profit margins and high chances of loss. This causes bot makers to just “give up”, turning off their losing bots. This also leads to centralization, as certain people have an “edge” over others, such as well-connected nodes or an agreement with a miner.

To contrast, Autonomy Network is more structured, with each validator bot having the exclusive rights to grab these piles of money at different times. This stops these cycles of bots bumping into each other as they wrestle for this tiny pile of money, saving a lot of time, gas and having better economic guarantees that your request will be executed (if you pay enough).

What can Autonomy be used for?

Right now, Autonomy Network hasn't launched most of its stuff yet, like the AUTO token, or its documentation. It's in beta currently.

The current main usecase of Autonomy is trading. Autonomy's request architecture allows for limit orders and other stuff available on a CEX, on AutoSwap.Trade.

It could potentially be used in the future to create blockchain life, or NFTs that can run transactions on their own and be autonomous, these things could be used in the Metaverse too. Who knows?

I think Autonomy's really cool and I'll definitely be buying the token when it launches. Not financial advice by the way.

🚀

tags down here as to not interrupt your reading: #autonomy #defi #dapp #dev #nft #pos #dex