Introduction

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Yagi Automation is a network of keepers on StarkNet L2 that automate protocol actions

There are three participants in our system:

Task authors create automations. These are smart contracts that need to be invoked on a regular basis,
Automation keepers execute automations,
End-users use different automations to take advantage of emerging yield opportunities.

Yagi is a protocol that connects task authors and automation keepers and a community that connects task authors with end-users.

Why Automation?

Some types of smart contracts require regular upkeep. For example, vaults need to harvest rewards, trading strategies require rebalancing of positions and players playing on-chain games seek to automate their farming.

StarkNet (like other built-in networks) does not support automated smart contract invocation. Smart contracts can only be invoked from "outside" the network whether by an external user or a computer program that mimics a user interaction.

But it's problematic for smart contract teams to maintain their own automation infrastructure:

Opportunity cost. Developing a bot distracts developer time from the core product,
No redundancy. A single bot is a single point of failure,
Centralization. A protocol relying on the team's own proprietary execution infrastructure could be tactically exploited (e.g., by withholding or front-running executions at certain points in time).

Yagi is a network of keepers that will execute smart contracts as required by their authors. To create an automated smart contract, a task author will create a Yagi task and define when it should be called and how it should be called by the keepers. After deploying the task, keepers will begin automated execution.

StarkNet transactions are currently free so Yagi Automation is free to use.

Benefits of Yagi Automation

There are several benefits to using Yagi Automation:

No need to deploy off-chain code, creating a task only requires building 2 smart contract functions,
Increased reliability by working with a network of keepers,
On-chain transparency of execution requirements and parameters builds trust from community.

Why StarkNet?

In short, we believe StarkNet is the best available architecture for enabling mass-automation on-chain. Due to low transaction cost, automations on StarkNet will be cheaper than anywhere else and also will be able to execute more complex tasks. As a result, we expect Yagi automations will enable entirely new use cases for DeFi, NFTs, gaming and other verticals.

You can read our more detailed perspective about this: