Autonomous Smart Contracts
Massa smart contracts have the unique feature of being able to autonomously define when they will be active, without external actors. By the end of this page, you will have a basic understanding of:
The limitations of smart contracts as they exist in today’s blockchains
How Massa solve limitations current smart contracts by allowing to pre-program execution
The mechanisms behind autonomous smart contracts
Introduction
Issues with current smart contracts
Automating IT processes are at the heart of pretty much every industry we can think of, and if we narrow it down to modern finance, nowadays most actions are initiated by automated mechanisms. When we take a closer look at decentralized finance, only certain actions of lending and arbitration are done automatically, however they are executed by bots operating off-chain. This is because without external calls, smart contracts as they exist in all public blockchains cannot perform automated operations.
Many decentralized protocols rely on recurrent triggers of certain functions in order to work as planned. In case of decentralized lending protocols, borrowers lock crypto assets (cryptocurrencies or fungible tokens) in order to take out loans. When the price of the collateralized asset decreases below a threshold, the borrower’s position becomes under-collateralized if he doesn’t promptly react to the decrease in value of that collateral. To ensure that the protocol behaves correctly, such positions must be liquidated. Liquidations are currently performed by organizations or individuals running bots, usually on some centralized cloud services.
The need for a reliable automation mechanism
There are countless applications that rely on such recurrent triggers. As a result, a lot of time and energy has been spent trying to develop more reliable networks of bots to guarantee that transactions are executed when needed. However, as those solutions are inherently off-chain, there’s no guarantee that the execution will be effectively triggered. And when those bots fail to execute such transactions, those protocols are at risk (and the applications built on top of them).
Autonomous Smart Contracts
Massa’s Autonomous Smart Contracts solve the issues of lacking reliability, sophistication and centralization around dApps that want to offer automated smart contract executions on behalf of their users. Autonomous Smart Contracts introduce self wake-up capabilities to smart contracts. Smart contracts can be programmed to perform arbitrary operations, for example triggering a call when a specific exchange rate target of an LP pool is met.
Such automated capabilities open the door to various applications, from automated liquidation of under-collateralized positions on lending protocols, to on-chain trading bots, or ever evolving NFTs.
Mechanism in Massa network
This system works by emitting messages which will schedule an execution. To do so, the following must be specified:
The address of the SC to be executed
The function to be executed
The desired execution window
(Optional) The activation triggers
Normally, when you submit an operation, the operation is sent in the operation pool and in the future included in a block to be executed: you pay the gas at execution time. With autonomous SCs, the message is emitted inside of the operation and and you pay the gas for the message execution upfront. The message is then sent to another pool called the async pool.
This pool is deterministic by nature, as it’s filled with information that comes from operations included in blocks which is processed by every node of the network.
The pool has a finite size, and sorts its messages with a similar behaviour as the operation pool: there is a priority, which is computed from the message emission fees, maximum execution gas, and length of the execution window. The messages get removed after a certain number of slots if they were not executed.
The number of messages that can be executed by each slot are limited by a maximum amount of gas like normal operations and so it’s possible that your message isn’t executed at the slot that you want (such as operations that could be not included in the first block after you sent it), but in a later slot, when there is enough space to include your message. If you want to have your message to be included as soon as possible, you have to put more fees than the others (just like the operations).
The order of the messages is determined by the formula:
(Reverse(Ratio(msg.fee, max(msg.max_gas,1))), emission_slot, emission_index),
where emission_index is an index that differentiate multiple messages created in the same slot.
Going further
If you want to go further and start coding your own autonomous smart contract, you can read more about the ABI that allows you to automate your smart contracts and find examples of autonomous smart contracts here.