Skeeper addresses a critical need within the Soroban community by introducing an accessible and versatile smart contract automation platform and infrastructure. It provides Soroban ecosystem participants with an opportunity to automate their smart contract operations and transactions. We’ll be focusing on protocols (B2B) which will integrate our Keeper tools into their platform. Here are some of the use cases:

• Automated yield harvest 
• Liquidations 
• Protection from Liquidations
• Contract pause in case there is an attack 
• Portfolio rebalancing 
• Oracle updates

Skeeper will provide a comprehensive UI and an SDK, as well as robust infrastructure to build products on top of it. Builders will be able to create workflows using different types of triggers such as:

• timer
• api call
• event emitted on Soroban
• custom logic (for instance, price of a token reaches certain target)

Skeeper will use google cloud infrastructure to achieve reliable scheduling of user tasks. Additionally, the initial version will run two Stellar nodes introducing redundancy for task execution.

The product will be free at the beginning with reasonable rate-limiting. As we prepare our infrastructure for scale and implement custom triggers we want to introduce monetization. Here are our current monetization models, but we listen carefully to our stakeholders and adopt it consequently: 

• Fixed fee per ordinary triggered transactions
• Fixed fee per custom trigger check

• % of network consumption fees

Nikita Kisel - Senior Software Engineer, with 9 years of experience. Spent most of the career in fintech. Built scalable back-ends and infrastructures. Switched to web3 in the last 2 years building projects mainly for EVM blockchains. Pationate about DeFi and infrastructure projects.

Ilia Darsavelidze - Product Manager, with 3+ years of experience. Have worked on various DeFi projects which were being built with the funding from different foundations. Have worked on Protopool - decentralized liquid staking solution funded by SSV foundation. Protobox - S3 to Swarm migration tool. I also have worked on various web 2.0 projects. My passion and goal in these projects have always been to make simple, intuitive UX and I always come out of that mindset. I have managed various cross functional team to deliver projects for international clients. I’ll also oversee the delivery process of Skeeper.

1. Platform 
   1. Description - Design and develop simple yet intuitive UI for the users so that they can use the core functionality of the product. The UI will include the implementation of a simple email based login with Auth0 which will also act as a security layer. This initial implementation will focuse on managing jobs running on a schedule. It will allow users to create a job, see exciting jobs and delete/modify one.
   2. Acceptance criteria - The user can log in, create a job or modify the existing one.
   3. Timeline - Will take 15 days to be completed. We’ll start working on this from the beginning of the project.
   4. Budget - $10,142
2. Scheduled Job infrastructure
   1. Description - Develop job management database and API, as well as job execution infrastructure. This includes configuring all cloud services and developing a worker service for job execution that will be deployed alognside stellar node. At this stage we may not have reliable Stellar node infrastructure yet so we may use a public RPC or an unstable server.
   2. Acceptance criteria - a PoC version of the product where users can create jobs and see them executed on schedule.
   3. Timeline - Will take 29 days to be completed. We’ll start working on this from the beginning of the project.
   4. Budget - $17,819
3. API for triggering Jobs

       a. Description - Add a second type of jobs that are triggered via API call. Authorization is done via API key that will be generated in the user profile on the UI. Will reuse infrastructure developed on the previous step.

       b. Acceptance criteria - Users are able to create jobs and trigger them via API

       c. TImeline - Will take 7 days to be completed. We'll start working on this in the 5th week of the project.

       d. Budget - $5,474

4. Node Infrastructure
   1. Description - Develop node infrastructure which will support the backend services. The initial version will run two Stellar nodes introducing redundancy for task execution. Servers will be rented from different datacenters and vendors from various geographic locations so we do not have a single point of failure. When the job automation layer interacts with the nodes, it should ensure the job (transaction) is executed and the result is acknowledged.
   2. Acceptance criteria - Stellar node is running on a stable server  and is able to handle load from initial usage.
   3. Timeline - Will take 6 days to be completed. We’ll start working on this in the 5th week of the project.
   4. Budget - $4,038

1. Event-based triggers - we want to support triggering jobs based on events emitted from Soroban. We will develop another service for listening events and matching them with customers' jobs. This will increase the amount of use-cases our platform will support. It will create a tight relationship between automated jobs and smart contracts allowing them to interact with one another. We estimate this will cost around $20,000 to develop.
2. Custom automation logic - we’ll allow customers to write custom triggers for executing jobs. Here it’s crucial to achieve a high level of scalability to be able to run custom triggers frequently so on this step we'll invest in further improving the infrastructure to be able to support new use-cases. This may go hand-in-hand with monetization where the costs will mainly depend on the frequency of trigger execution. This is a decent bulk of work and we expect a budget of around $60,000.
3. Additional infrastructure development -  We’ll also work on making our infrastructure more robust and scalable through adding layers of safety mechanisms to eliminate possible downtime. We'll do necessary calculations to understand scalability requirements and design a solution that will be able support them. We'll also set up extensive monitoring and alerting. The budget of this work is epxected to be about $20,000
4. Additional UI/UX improvement - As said in the grant application the initial version will have a very simple UI with a sole purpose of making the functionality usable for the users. For the future, we’ll be focusing on creating more appealing UI and UX, and consider adding some gamification mechanisms to it. This process should take somewhere between 4 weeks and the budget will be $12,000.
5. Developer SDK - For more complex workflows developers may want to use an SDK and deploy tasks from command line or as a part of build pipeline while keeping their jobs in source control. To streamline dev experience we want to build an SDK for interacting with out platform. Budget estimate is around $15,000.