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ChronoLogic's vision has always been to solve time-based problems on the blockchain. The partnership with Piper Mirriam on the Ethereum Alarm Clock has provided a core focus on scheduling with a lot of tooling for scheduling applications.
Decentralized, Trustless Scheduling
The Ethereum Alarm Clock is the first on-chain, decentralized scheduling protocol for Ethereum, it provides crypto-economic incentives for TimeNodes to execute transactions in the future for third parties. This opens up a lot of use-cases such as scheduling contributions to ICO's without worrying about missing a cut-off date.
Scheduled ICO Contributions
In fact, scheduling ICO contributions not only helps end users, it also helps ICO launchers. Projects doing a crowdsale prefer early commitment from contributors and having information about expected demand. That's why ChronoLogic developed the ICO Starter, to help ICO launchers accept scheduled contributions with the click of a button.
Conditional Scheduling Provides True Smart Contract Automation
The development team has been moving forward on a series of applications for the next generation of scheduling protocol, called Chronos. In Chronos, ChronoLogic team has improved upon the Ethereum Alarm Clock by optimizing gas costs and other factors that make scheduling an obstacle for end users. The exciting possibility that is opening up is something ChronoLogic is calling "Conditional Scheduling". This is a function that would store conditions in a smart contract so that when conditions are met, the smart contract is triggered. This allows true automation to occur.
As ChronoLogic surveys Ethereum leaders, one use case that many have talked about is the conditional execution of orders on decentralized exchanges. ChronoLogic developers won first place at the MelonPort Reinvent Finance Hackathon for proving the Chronos Protocol could achieve such a function.
Schedule Transfer of Any ERC-20 Token
ChronoLogic's scheduling is purely on Ethereum for now, therefore any ERC20 token can be scheduled for things such as monthly salary payments, bounty releases, and staking.
The token allocation distributor has been developed by ChronoLogic as a side project that resolves the issue of vested token distributions. It also serves as a trust-less way to split (ERC-20) tokens between addresses. Use cases are to distribute dividends between the addresses, to make payment for services to a group of addresses, and also to distribute vested funds.
Recurring Payments, Subscription Models
One of the applications of scheduling is for recurring payments, such as subscriptions. One of the only ways to do pseudo-recurring payments on Ethereum is to pay for multiple months worth of services up front and schedule them to execute monthly using the Ethereum Alarm Clock. Using the ERC-20 Token stable coin DAI, one could avoid the volatility issues that many are concerned about with recurring payments in Ethereum. There is currently a proposal in the Ethereum community to create a standard for subscriptions and ChronoLogic is in the working group.
Ethereum leaders are interested in ChronoLogic's TimeNode concept for State Channels and other scaling solutions due to a TimeNode's ability to act as a watchtower. Currently the Ethereum Alarm Clock is awaiting a security audit by esteemed smart contract auditor Bokky Poobah. After the audit is complete, one will be able to schedule ERC-20 Tokens on MyCrypto.com through a "Send Later" option.
Run a TimeNode, Earn ETH Bounties
ChronoLogic is expecting a demand for TimeNodes once the Ethereum Alarm Clock goes to the main net. These TimeNodes will use a browser or desktop app on their mobile phone or computer to automatically watch for, claim, and execute transactions for schedulers. TimeNodes earn ETH bounties for successfully executing transactions, providing an alternative to mining for earning ETH in the Ethereum ecosystem.
