Houdini Swap Staking Automation

Inspiration

The core utility behind our upcoming token ($POOF) launch surrounds the staking contract. Our staking contract manages token distributions for two earning streams:

Earn $POOF yield by locking tokens for a specific period of time.
Users of our platform Houdini Swap can earn commissions from their own swaps or referring others to swap.

Given the complexity behind these two earning streams, it is difficult manually check if the contract has sufficient $POOF to distribute rewards. If the balance is lower than the amount require to distribute rewards, it would lead to user distrust and ultimately hurt our reputation.

About Houdini Swap

The Problem: Bank accounts provide a high degree of personal privacy from friends, family, and colleagues. Even if you know a lot of identifying information about a person, it is extremely difficult to find out how much money he/she has in their bank account.

Why should crypto be any different? In crypto, if your wallet address becomes known, your balance and all your crypto activities are known and traceable.

It's nobody's business: I can be judged for my spending habits. Privacy is a right: I can be tracked and bullied for selling activity in DeFi. It's a matter of security: I can be doxxed, found, stalked, hacked, or attacked.

The Solution: Houdini Swap invented the "Conduit Swap System", which is a legal and regulatory compliant system that breaks the link between sending and receiving wallets using Monero as a "tunnel" between exchanges.

Houdini Swap supports anonymous swaps between over 15 different currencies.

What it does

We used Chainlink Automation to automate the workflow of identifying if the balance on the staking contract is low and then triggering an action to fill it up. Here is the workflow:

Check to see the how much $POOF is owed as rewards based on each user's lockup period and associated APY.
Check the amount of $POOF in the Staking Contract.
If the amount of $POOF in the Staking Contract is lower than the amount of $POOF owed as rewards, then it triggers a transfer of $POOF into the Staking Contract.

How we built it

We used a combination of Solidity+React and then Hardhat to test.

Challenges we ran into

Nothing notable to report here. Chain Link's docs were thorough and well produced. We also had direct access to Chain Link's team on Telegram for additional support.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Given the complexity of Houdini Swap, we require development resources to be allocated to support its growth. Houdini Swap has completed over USD$4,000,000 in swap volume and we are growing at a staggering 20% week over week.

Adding in this layer of automation to our Staking Contract is a huge relief for the team and frees up bandwidth. Prior to this, we would have been able to create manual "alerts", although we did not have a solution to create an action from this alert.

What we learned

A solution like Chain Link Automation is excellent for triggering web3 actions. We are already considering how we could implement this solution in more places on our backend. It solves a real problem!