First Published on @IOSG Medium on Sep 26, 2020

Too high the gas? This project has an automation solution for this problem and many more!

Over the past few weeks, the gas costs on Ethereum have experienced new record highs, easily costing between $50 and over $300 for a single operation with decentralized protocols. With the recent hype around yield farming in decentralized finance (DeFi) projects, gas costs have become an increasing obstacle for users with smaller amounts of assets to participate in them. Some of the long-term solutions for much-reduced gas costs would involve migrating today’s applications running on Ethereum to layer 2 rollups or the eventual migration from Ethereum to Ethereum 2.0.

However, there are alternative solutions that could provide some level of mitigation to the gas problem today.

Gelato Network is a project that we recently led an investment round in (https://www.coindesk.com/gelato-smart-contracts-ethereum-galaxy-digital). It aims to make automation a default option for any transactions on Ethereum. For instance, with just a few lines of code, it would allow users to accumulate gas tokens (e.g., CHI) when the gas price is below a certain threshold, and leverage such accumulated gas tokens to execute transactions when gas prices are more expensive. All such conditions can be fully customized according to the preference and priority of different transactions that the users need to make. For instance, routine claims of DeFi yield farming rewards could wait a bit longer when gas prices are higher.

Automating the process of accumulating gas tokens and saving transaction costs is just one example of the enormous possibilities Gelato Network is realizing, ranging from automated token swaps, payments to liquidation bots. In essence, we believe automation will become a commonplace feature on Ethereum and even other blockchains.

We are very excited about the next steps of Gelato Network, with this round of funding enabling the team to embark on an accelerated path with its development and ecosystem building.

Speaking of their recent investment into Gelato Network, Jocy Lin, the founding partner of IOSG Ventures said, “Automation is such a fundamental demand on a decentralized network that is going to be highly sought after as the types of dApps we are building and using proliferate. DeFi is just an immediate example where automation is critical, and we are going to see more of such applications leveraging automation for reducing costs, improving efficiency and really scaling up the businesses. We’re excited to be backing Gelato for building this critical infrastructure for the next generation Web.”