⏰ Are smart contracts finally going to learn how to "set their own alarms"? The Monad team has put forward a proposal
Many people don't know that smart contracts on EVM chains like Ethereum have a longstanding flaw: they can't act on their own. Someone has to send an external transaction to "wake them up" before their code will run.
So things that need to happen "at a set time"—like liquidations, dollar-cost averaging, and refunds at expiration—are mostly handled by off-chain keeper bots that keep watch. If a bot goes down or runs out of gas, the action that should have been executed simply doesn't happen.
According to a news roundup on X, Category Labs, the team behind Monad, has proposed a protocol-level solution:
🔹 Reserve 10% of each block's gas specifically for "scheduled transactions"
🔹 Anyone can schedule one through a precompiled contract, pay in advance, and have it guaranteed to execute at the scheduled time
🔹 Scheduled transactions are visible on-chain, can be canceled, and can be chained together for recurring tasks
🔹 Most of the fees are burned to align incentives
Potential uses include routine DeFi maintenance, recurring payments, automatic refunds when escrow expires, and automatically clearing expired orders.
My take: This is a "boring" but genuinely practical improvement. Quite a few DeFi incidents happen not because the code was hacked, but because something that should have been triggered wasn't. That said, this is still just a draft on a forum, currently open for feedback, and nowhere near launch—don't treat it as positive news for MON and rush to buy. Also, whether reserving 10% of block space could make things even tighter for regular transactions during congestion is worth discussing.
Do you think on-chain "scheduled tasks" really need to be built into the protocol, or are keepers good enough? Let's discuss in the comments 👇
#Monad #智能合约 #DeFi #Ethereum