Alchemix Integrates Chainlink Keepers for Vault Harvesting and Launches new price feeds for DeFi

As you may know, Alchemix brings a completely new financial primitive to DeFi and expands the utility of existing yield-earning dApps like Yearn. We’re excited to announce that the exciting services provided by Alchemix just got even better through a new integration with Chainlink Keepers that automates the entire process. Alchemix is actively moving towards true decentralisation and automation. An important step in the process means using Chainlink Keepers and their leading oracle solution.

Even more, we have also sponsored the launch of a new Chainlink Price Feed for our native token ALCX to support its adoption as collateral across the DeFi ecosystem. The launch of a Chainlink Price enables ALCX to become easily integrated by any DeFi protocol in a secure and reliable manner. This integration serves as an extension of our previous integration of Chainlink Price Feeds, which we use to issue loans at fair market prices and help ensure the peg of minted tokens are maintained.

Integrating keepers

In order to enable automation, someone needs to trigger the yield harvesting and debt repayment functions in the smart contract on a regular basis. This is because smart contracts are not actually autonomous, but instead are “asleep” by default and need to be “woken up” by an on-chain transaction in order to run their coded logic.

Pushing this transaction triggering process onto the users is a non-starter because it’s a poor user experience and the gas costs involved make it impractical for all but large whales. Alternatively, running our own server to trigger this process would require us to build, manage, and deploy our own DevOps solution over the long term, which could be prone to downtime, involves additional trust assumptions, and sucks up a large amount of time from our developers that otherwise would be building core business logic for Alchemix.

Therefore, we have chosen to integrate Chainlink Keepers — a decentralised transaction automation service that triggers key smart contract functions when predefined conditions are met. This helps provide users greater assurance that their positions will be continuously paid down over time, without any manual interactions from themselves or the Alchemix team.

Additional benefits of Chainlink Keepers include:

• High Uptime — Chainlink Keepers are run by the same professional DevOps teams that have an established on-chain performance history, and provide high reliability for Chainlink Price Feeds during extreme network congestion and market volatility.
• Low Costs — Chainlink Keepers have several gas-optimising features that lower the costs of automating maintenance tasks for users, including a rotating node selection process to prevent gas price auction wars and stabilise costs.
• Decentralised Execution — Chainlink leverages a decentralised and transparent pool of Keepers to help provide strong guarantees around secure contract automation, saving time and mitigating risks around manual interventions or centralised servers.
• Expandable Computation — Chainlink Keepers perform off-chain computations and generate calldata that is verifiable by smart contracts, enabling advanced, trust-minimised dApps at lower costs.

New price feeds

Our integration with Chainlink does not stop there. We have also sponsored the launch of the ALCX/USD Chainlink Price Feed, which is now live on Ethereum mainnet. Since Chainlink Price Feeds are a common requirement for many DeFi applications that secure high amounts of value, this launch allows DeFi protocols to now seamlessly add support for ALCX as collateral.

Chainlink Price Feeds have proven to be highly resilient against a multitude of unexpected situations like API downtime, flash crash outliers, and data manipulation (e.g. flash loans). As such, we recommend any protocol looking to add support for ALCX in their application to leverage the ALCX/USD Chainlink Price Feed to help protect their users from exploits. If this interests you, we encourage you to reach out to our team and we are more than happy to provide support.

Protocols like Abracadabra Money have already begun to leverage Chainlink Price Feeds to support ALCX as collateral, enabling users to mint the MIM stablecoin against their ALCX. Furthermore, the launch of the ALCX/USD Chainlink Price Feed plays a key role in our work with Aave, where we are working to add support for ALCX on their decentralised money market. In the future, additional Chainlink Price Feeds are planned, such as alUSD, effectively using Chainlink as a money lego that helps make our native asset more easily composed within other DeFi applications.

“Strengthening our integration with Chainlink was an obvious choice given the proven security, reliability, and diversity of their decentralised services. As a result, we are able to create a self-paying loan solution that is decentralised and automated end-to-end, as well as quickly bootstrapping adoption for ALCX within other DeFi protocols. Both of these features were only achievable in an efficient yet highly secure manner due to the permissionless composability in DeFi,” Scoopy Trooples.

About Chainlink

Chainlink is the industry standard oracle network for powering hybrid smart contracts. Chainlink Decentralised Oracle Networks provide developers with the largest collection of high-quality data sources and secure off-chain computations to expand the capabilities of smart contracts on any blockchain. Managed by a global, decentralised community, Chainlink currently secures billions of dollars in value for smart contracts across decentralised finance (DeFi), insurance, gaming, and other major industries.

Chainlink is trusted by hundreds of organisations, from global enterprises to projects at the forefront of the blockchain economy, to deliver definitive truth via secure, reliable oracle networks. To learn more about Chainlink, visit chain.link and subscribe to the Chainlink newsletter. To understand the full vision of the Chainlink Network, read the Chainlink 2.0 whitepaper. Want to discuss an integration? Talk to an expert.

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About Alchemix

Alchemix Finance is a future-yield backed synthetic asset platform and community DAO, managing hundreds of millions of dollars in value. The platform gives you advances on your yield via a synthetic token that represents a fungible claim on any underlying collateral in the Alchemix protocol. The globally decentralised team is composed of DeFi natives who wish to push innovation in the space forward.

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