Some Keeper-related questions

Developers
#1

I am completely new to Ethereum development. In an effort to fund my further studies, I am designing a Keeper bot. I have implemented nothing; I am starting by laying out a basic set of behaviors that I want my bot to exhibit based on certain criteria, a diagram for how the program will function. For this, I kindly ask the community for some information:

  1. When my bot receives a deposit of Ether from its owner, I want it to do one thing; when it wins an auction and the purchase is Ether, I want it to do a different thing. When an auction completes, how is the purchase delivered to its new owner? Is there a way to differentiate it from someone just sending Ether to the bot?

  2. Is there a cost to losing an auction aside from the gas used to bid?

  3. Is the bidder notified if they lose an auction?

  4. I’m a bit unclear as to how these Keeper bots work. Are they smart contracts? Are they scripts that you’d run on a node? What are their limitations?

1 Like
#2

The liquidation 2.0 system that is currently under design will be much more liquidator friendly (and easier to implement a bot for).
I am not sure about the timelines for it though.
From my experience it takes few weeks to build a bot for the liquidation 1.0 (now 1.2) system.
So you might want to wait, or start working on the 2.0 immediately.

#3

I guess you should check already implemented auction keeper.

I am not aware of any other implementations.

#4

I am not certain if you understand how ethereum works. It probably makes sense to invest few days in reading yellow paper, understanding transactions fields on etherscan etc…

Blockchain can’t magically notify you. Client (web3 library) monitors transaction’s EVM logging (events).

#5

When I say “notify”, I’m not talking about emails and text messages. I had assumed that the client (whichever that happened to be) would be responsible for notifying the user. I’m asking if there is some kind of event logged by the contract when an auction completes (so the client can tell the user about it somehow), or if the end time is kept in a public record somewhere in the auction contract, or what the method is for keeping track of that.

The reason is that if the purchase is not automatically delivered to the winner, and there is some kind of claiming mechanism, the software needs to know when to claim. Again, I’m going to look into all of this in detail (side question: assuming I know nothing more than how to use a computer, and some basic programming knowledge, what topics would I need to research for such a project? What is the prerequisite knowledge? I’m building a reading list.) but right now I’m just looking for some simple surface-level answers that I can base a rough diagram on.