Gelato

What is Gelato?

Gelato is the decentralized backbone of web3, providing builders with the capability to craft advanced smart contracts that operate autonomously, without gas fees, and with off-chain intelligence. This functionality is available across major EVM-compatible blockchains, including Ethereum, Polygon, Fantom, Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Optimism, and more.

Gelato currently offers four core services:

• Web3 Functions: Link your smart contracts to off-chain data and computations through the execution of decentralized cloud functions.
• Automate: Streamline your smart contracts by enabling automated transaction execution in a dependable, developer-friendly, and decentralized manner.
• Relay: Extend to your users access to reliable, resilient, and scalable gasless transactions via a user-friendly API.
• Gasless Wallet: Utilize a potent SDK that allows developers to deliver a world-class user experience by combining Gelato Relay with Safe's Smart Contract Wallet, enabling Account Abstraction.

---

Recent Video Interview

Main points of the interview:

• Founded Gelato to address smart contract automation and decentralized infrastructure needs.
• Gelato started by building applications for hackathons, leading to the development of a general automation protocol.
• Key challenges included creating user-specific solutions and later generalizing them for broader applications.
• Decentralization and user-focused development, prioritizing practical problem-solving over competition.

---

How Does Gelato Work?

Their mission revolves around offering developers a collection of modular web3 devops services, empowering them to construct decentralized and resilient protocols.

To achieve this, the Gelato Network serves as a marketplace that unites two key participants: developers seeking to automate transactions and infrastructure operators running executor bots eager to complete tasks in exchange for a nominal fee.

The Gelato Network stands out as a sustainable, revenue-generating protocol. It exhibits a strong appetite for transactions, with an intriguing dynamic at play. As more transactions are automated through the services of Executors, their compensation per transaction diminishes, covering their fixed infrastructure expenses. Executors find value in running their infrastructure based on the increased transaction volume, rather than the individual transaction's value. This unique approach renders Gelato a more cost-effective option for dApps compared to maintaining their centralized keeper system.

Gelato Team Background and Partnerships

Gelato is founded by Hilmar Orth and Luis Schliesske. Back in 2019, they and other builders grew frustrated with the limitations of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), particularly the constraints of smart contract functionality and the necessity to manage when logic should execute outside the network. Automating smart contracts was far less efficient then, leading every web3 project to establish and maintain its own complex and costly centralized infrastructure for computation. It was clear that a general network was needed, one that didn't force web3 developers to compromise between development speed, reliability, and decentralization.

The solution they conceived was Gelato. This well-tested network empowers developers by offering dependable infrastructure to support the next generation of DeFi, NFT, and gaming applications in web3. In essence, Gelato combines web2 functionality with web3's data democratization, providing a way forward for the industry.

Gelato is trusted by leading projects within the crypto spaces. Some of the most notable names are MakerDAO, Optimism, Safe, Gnosis Pay, ZedRun, LayerZero, Pancake Swap, Connext, Beefy, Abracadabra, Balancer, Alpaca Finance...

Gelato Project Development

Gelato's Web3 Functions play a vital role as a robust connection between on-chain and off-chain processes, offering developers the capability to trigger on-chain transactions based on various off-chain data sources, such as APIs and subgraphs. Up until October 2023, Web3 Functions have achieved their quickest execution time of 5 seconds when processed sequentially. However, the introduction of Parallel Executions marks a significant advancement, ushering in a new era of even shorter latency. This enhancement enables more frequent executions, increases overall throughput, and ultimately reduces execution time to just 1 second.

With this latest update to Web3 Functions, developers gain the ability to swiftly react to on-chain events in real-time.

Gelato's Web3 Functions now facilitate immediate responses to on-chain events, surpassing the need for continuous event polling, thanks to their low latency and parallel processing capabilities. This results in robust event monitoring, rapid response times, and efficient resource utilization by triggering functions upon the emission of on-chain events.

These improvements open the door to optimizing perpetual trading by delivering real-time alerts, facilitating off-chain data queries for smart contracts, and providing instantaneous on-chain notifications. The implementation process is streamlined with the introduction of Web3FunctionEventContext for on-chain event handling, simplifying event log parsing and management.