Running a Keeper with a low initial capital

Hi everyone,

After reading about Keep3r a few weeks ago in a Medium article from @andre.cronje, I’ve been contemplating the idea of running my own Keeper. While I am relatively confident about the devops side of things, I am however worried about the initial capital requirements for running a Keeper.

Essentially:

  • To be able to run jobs, Keepers have to have enough ETH to cover the gas fees;
  • Since I don’t have the capital to buy 100 tokens at their current market price, I can’t use the MetaKeep3r contract to recoup my gas costs by exchanging the bonded KP3R tokens that I would receive for running jobs;
  • Since the only active job which rewards keepers directly in ETH is the Keep3rV1Oracle which requires 200 bonded tokens–for completely understandable reasons–I can’t go this route either;
  • Therefore my only option seems to buy enough ETH upfront to cover 14 days worth of fees, to find jobs, to somehow finish them first without spending a gas price greater than the indicated fast gas price (which is not easy given that two or three keepers already have the resources to out-gas me), and then to unbond all of my KP3R after 14 days to swap them for ETH to recoup my gas fees.
  • Even in that last scenario, I have to hope that the KP3R/ETH exchange rate is going to either remain constant or go up (otherwise I’ll run at a loss here too since the reward would have been computed based on a 14-day old price), which I’m scared is a lot to ask given the speculator-induced volatility of the price.

So I’m wondering if I’m missing something obvious here, or if you guys have any ideas as to how I could at least hedge myself against a drop in KP3R/ETH–I don’t really care about making profit here, I would just like to avoid running at a loss.

Thanks a lot! :slightly_smiling_face:

Yeah I believe the 100 should be changed every once in a while to match a certain capital $ requirement… so for example, like $5k is maybe achievable by many… so once a week/month change the requirement based on the average price in the last day to match that $5k …

Those are all questions/thoughts I’ve had myself. I too don’t have a large amount of capital to invest up front so I went with the option to do some work for a little period of time (a few days), then unbond and recoup my ETH to then be able to do work for a little longer period, rinse and repeat.

I set up my bot to only work jobs if the KP3R/ETH rate was below a certain level to prevent a big loss if the price decreased too much over the unbonding period. Seeing that it’s near its ATH right now, I would not suggest on paying gas for KP3R.

It was working well, but then the UniswapV1Oracle job was swapped out for Keep3rV1Oracle so I could no longer do work. The other jobs are still workable, but not nearly as often, so overall profit would be slashed. Seeing that the Keep3rV1Oracle job/MetaKeep3r is pretty much the only way to ensure you don’t run at a loss, keepers are kinda being pushed into the large capital investment. I’m not a fan of this move and proposed a change ([Proposal] Reduce minKeep on Keep3rV1Oracle to 0), but it appears nothing will happen (or really even be discussed).

So it seems this project is for the whales at this point and being a keeper with a few KP3R does not make sense. A few KP3R = speculative asset, a lot of KP3R = utility.

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