Introduction to Gelato
Hey everyone!
I’m Dan - Legendary Member at Gelato
Summary
This is an introduction to Gelato and serves as a follow-up to prior discussions with contributors of the Moonwell ecosystem, specifically referencing this forum post https://forum.moonwell.fi/t/auto-compounding-staking-rewards-functionality/32 by @Jeremy_JP, which requests the added functionality of certain automated features within Moonwell.
This post aims to educate the community about Gelato, and how our services can be seamlessly integrated into the Moonwell ecosystem.
Why Web3 projects choose to work with Gelato
One of the biggest problems that prevents blockchains from achieving wider adoption is the complexity of building and operating Web3 applications that offer a user and developer experience that is comparable to web2 applications.
This is not surprising, as web2 infrastructure (including developer APIs, tooling, and servers) has been developed over the past 30 years, providing developers with a solid foundation to build upon.
Web3 is in need of a similar infrastructure that enables projects to only have to focus on their core business logic rather than deep technical issues that arise when building Web3 applications at scale. This includes services that deliver superior user onboarding and a seamless experience, the ability to operate and automate an application’s processes as well as enabling developers to enrich their Web3 applications with off-chain data.
This means, we need an infrastructure that abstracts away a lot of the low level complexities of operating Web3 applications and provides users with a better UX, while retaining the properties of decentralization, transparency and having no single point of failure.
Gelato provides such an infrastructure for developers and helps them overcome three of the most pressing limitations public blockchains have today:
1. Reliably operating Web3 applications
Even though smart contracts define the rules and business logic of an application, they don’t actually automatically execute them by themselves. If a system like a dynamic NFT provider relies on having to automatically execute smart contract functions in order to change the visual of the NFT every 10 minutes, then developers would normally still need to do this manually. This makes them become the central bottleneck of their own system and leads to an unreliable service due to the complex nature of automating thousands of transactions at scale.
An integration between Gelato & Moonwell could pertain to a variety of use-cases such as implementing automatic compounding / claiming of for both WELL and MFAM staking rewards, the ability to automatically un-stake after the outlined cooldown period within the 2-day window, and many more automation and relaying use-cases.
Gelato Automate has a 80% market share in the smart contract automation space as it provides developers with the most seamless, scalable and reliable decentralized automation service in the market.
2. User Experience & Onboarding
To use a blockchain, developers need to ask their users to own and pay for each interaction with their native token. This makes it difficult to build interaction-heavy applications. In order to provide users with a “gasless” experience, teams have to employ entire backend teams to build, run, maintain and scale custom Relay infrastructure in order to provide a better user experience. In fact, many teams have voiced problems to us in regards to scalability and reliability issues of their current solutions for relaying transactions. In order to truly scale to hundreds of thousands of transactions per hour, they need a horizontally scalable and decentralized infrastructure like Gelato Relay.
3. Enriching Web3 applications with off-chain data
Blockchains are isolated from the rest of the web. This greatly limits the usefulness that Web3 applications can bring to their customers today. To tackle this issue, Gelato has been developing a novel off-chain data and computation service called Off-chain Resolvers. This new service enables developers to deploy custom backend scripts which fetch arbitrary off-chain data, validate it based on their security requirements and execute on-chain transactions based on them. Off-chain Resolvers enable projects to access data which is not available on-chain and connect their smart contracts to the real world. For example, on-chain music royalty payments based on how often songs on platforms like Spotify have been listened to. Ultimately, this makes decentralized applications significantly more powerful by enriching the user experience with relevant data.
Summarizing, Gelato enables decentralized applications to:
- Enable a seamless web2-like UX that is fast, scalable and responsive, by leveraging gasless transactions to make it easy for users to access the Web3 app without needing to pay for the network transaction fees themselves
- Help developers automate their on-chain processes in a decentralized and scalable way
- Enrich Web3 applications by giving them access to off-chain data from news sites, stock exchanges, or social networks which increase the applications usefulness for mainstream customers
Using Gelato, companies can finally overcome today’s limitations and accelerate user adoption as well as increase retention to help build sustainable digital communities.
Gelato has been live on Moonbeam and Moonriver since May 2022 (Gelato Brings Automation to Moonbeam Network | by Gelato | Gelato Network | Medium) and continues to execute transactions reliably across these networks. Gelato is also featured in Moonwell’s official documentation.
We have live integrations with some of the largest protocols in DeFi, such as MakerDAO, Aave, Connext, and Zed Run, powering a multitude of use cases, which can be seen on our website.
Call for Feedback
We are calling the community to share thoughts and provide feedback. We look forward to working closely with the Moonwell community and are delighted to continue exploring any further use cases for automation and relaying as they may arise within the Moonwell ecosystem. We would like to progress this introductory post naturally into a grant proposal following positive community feedback.
Resources:
Website: https://gelato.network
Documentation: docs.gelato.network
GitHub: Gelato · GitHub
Medium: Gelato – Medium
Twitter: twitter.com/gelatonetwork
Please feel free to leave any questions and feedback below.
Thanks for viewing!