Taariq Lewis @LewisTaariq, CEO of VolumeFi (volume.finance) hosts Señor Doggo @fubuloubu of ApeWorX (@ApeFramework) in this special AMA episode. They discuss the upcoming launch of ApeWorx’s newest and hottest product, Silverback. Silverback is a cutting-edge hosted cluster product that allows users to create and deploy bots that listen and respond to live on-chain events from newly confirmed blocks to contract event logs. This can also include monitoring new pool creations and depositing liquidity as well as measuring the trading activity of major protocols.
They also talk about DeFiLlama as a use case that requires huge resources as large chunks of data change quickly and the on-chain state and performance need to be monitored. Silverback can short-circuit two sets of operations such as monitoring and updating large data structures off-chain.
While Silverback has the listening and execution part, the next big thing that they are working on is off-chain computation. A query system with an aid that can produce data frames, like a main memory structure for the bots can be further improved fpr protocol-specific SDKs.
Paloma’s LightNode Sale opens on August 21st!
Taariq welcomes everyone to Volume’s Friday Twitter Spaces with ApeWorx. ApeWorX has been powering the Paloma chain and is an important part of the chain’s survival and growth. The host shares a brief background about Paloma.
The host welcomes Doug and asks him to talk about what’s new with the ApeWorx. Doug introduces Silverback, their biggest project this year, as they prepare to start shipping some of the hosted cluster products next week.
Silverback is a cluster or a collection of bots in different environments that will be listening to blockchain events, responding, and pushing out data. Those data will be collected into long-scale dashboarding and metrics collection.
When asked about how ApeWorX positions itself in AI, Doug states that the largest set of users of Ape is in the AI space because much of AI is Python-focused, much more so than everything else within crypto. ApeWorx is the primary Python framework for EVM chains.
Taariq asks the guest to expound on dashboards and how people may use the data from the Silverback cluster.
Silverback allows users to do computations in Python. If there is a specific task like a normal Python function, it will take a trigger input such as a new contract or a new block, and computations can be done there. Users can submit transactions, or even update a database where all data will be exported in long-term Parquet files which can be used in whichever way.
They discuss Silveback’s application in a specific use case, DefiLlama and DeFi strategies that tend to change quickly over time.
It will require a lot of resources to aggregate every contract, for example, monitor and determine the yield. Palomabots will take liquidity, deposit it, yield farm, and leave automatically. Taariq is curious if Silverback can track contracts for lending protocols, how they perform, and monitor the on-chain state.
The idea is to short-circuit two sets of operations such as monitoring and updating large data structures off-chain according to Doug.
Taariq explains that Palomabots contain liquidity for yourself. Paloma deploys bots on-chain and takes off-chain messages and directives. A bot that interacts with Morpho may be different than a bot that interacts with Aave, for example, but the strategies, response and execution are all off-chain. Liquidity is segregated per user.
Doug states that there is an on-chain component, a smart contract designed with certain parts of the rules that keeps the bots honest in case something happens to the infrastructure or if the code goes rogue. Paloma can build that on-chain component making sure that the bots abide by the rules while taking directives from users.
While DefiLlama is a great product, Taariq describes the seemingly daunting task of keeping up with yields that change every minute and every second. Pools change quickly and the need to aggregate and monitor them can be quite overwhelming. Paloma wants to provide yield as a service.
Silverback may provide the solution because it has real-time processing and execution capabilities merged.
Silverback’s pricing structure is still underway. Doug maintains that the Silverback clusters are quite advanced and there are seven or eight different accessees of pricing. ‘Doug describes how it works.
They do not offer RPC as there are already many providers in that area. People can choose their own Ape plugin system. For those who prefer a hosted signer service, Apeworx is currently using an AWS account plugin. There is a turnkey, similar to a hosted provider that has a rules-based signing for automation.
The platform uses its ApePay system prototyped with Chaos on a per-second streaming similar to LlamaPay.
Doug shares that the really interesting part is that users can have the bot pay for its own operation. He hopes to see more hosted service providers adopting crypto payments as a way to maintain subscriptions.
He hopes to lead the way to on-chain SaaS such that SaaS is the hybrid between the on-chain and the off-chain worlds. Silverback is a way to provide that.
Taariq congratulates Doug on the launching of Silverback.
He mentions that Paloma is very active in the Curve ecosystem and it would be very cool to use Silverback to enhance Curve bot execution.
Those who are interested in learning more about Silverback can reach out to Colleen of Apeworx @DeFiDipshit on Telegram.
While Silverback has the listening and execution part, the next big thing that they are working on is off-chain computation. They can build a query system with an aid that can produce data frames, like a main memory structure for the bots. They can further improve it with protocol-specific SDKs.
Apeworx has been experimenting with Uniswap with one that can listen to and produce large pool structures that find the most efficient routes. They can do this with Curve or any major protocol to have a nicer dev experience and a lot less code in the final application.
Taariq announces that the Paloma LightNode Sales will be launching on August 21st.
Stay tuned for the next AMA!
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