TRX1 Dev Blog #12 (December 2021)

5 min readJan 24, 2022

Wham! A whole year of development flew by. Why don’t we look at what was done in December and then look back at all the accomplishments for 2021?

THORChain Monitoring bot

The THORChain monitoring bot is my main project so far. When there are requests from the developers or the community, I always focus on them to fulfill their needs as quickly as possible.

Discord support

The bot expands its reach to new messengers. Surprisingly, it was relatively easy to redirect all types of notifications to the Discord channel. During December, it was being tested in our RuneAnalytics Discord community. Because of the way links are formatted, some posts look heavy and clumsy. Don’t worry, we’ll think of something to improve the formatting of the text. And by the way, we made Telegram stickers work in Discord.

In our community, we also had an idea for a bot that could check the Rune balance on the user’s wallet or the fact of providing liquidity. This is a kind of analog of “Collab.land” for THORChain. If you have any thoughts on Discord stuff, write to me.

Slack support

There was a request to add support for Slack. I obey.

Slack is a serious piece of software mainly for corporate users. Therefore, development for it is not as trivial as for other messengers. After opening my developer account, I had to read tons of documentation, watch a few videos, and create a couple of prototypes to understand the basic principles of how it works.

The biggest pain is managing tokens and installations. Luckily, libraries have already been created to do this smoothly. All that remains is to integrate them properly. I was able to get the button to install the application into your workspace to function properly. Well, that’s reassuring.

Of course, the bot has also learned to send its alerts to the Slack channel as well. Like this:

Now the main goal is to deploy a webserver to handle Slack requests alongside the bot operation. This will require a domain and certificate registration, as well as setting up Nginx and an updated Docker configuration. We’ll see how it goes in January.

NodeOp tools settings

The bot is moving toward more customization of notifications. Since there are more and more different types of messages it becomes more difficult to configure them in a chat dialog. It was decided to create a settings panel as a website. A user generates a secret link in a chat with the bot and sets up notifications in a comfortable environment. In the first phase, the frontend will allow to set up only the node state notifications for NodeOp tools.

This is what it looks like at the current stage:

Here you toggle and adjust the various types of notifications

Also, your favorite dark theme has been supported since day one.

Servicing this site will be done in tandem with handling Slack’s callbacks. So making them friends is another challenge.

Best pools

That’s a new Telegram bot’s feature. Maybe it encourages you to add more liquidity?

Also available in the metrics menu.

New inline commands

In the inline mode, there were added new commands such as “pools”, “stats”, “price”. In any Telegram chat just type:

@thor_infobot price 7d
or
@thor_infobot pools
or 
@thor_infobot stats

And send the suggested message template to any chat room.

Misc

During December, there were some changes to THORChain’s interfaces. To ensure the stable operation of the bot, the appropriate fixes have been made. In particular, this applies to work with Mimir.

Restrictions in the dialog box will prevent errors while the bot is loading after restarting.

The logging system has been improved, with easy remote access to logs.

A test instance of the bot with the latest code is running constantly on a separate server to test and debug fresh features.

Links

MCCN Alert channel (English): https://t.me/thorchain_alert
MCCN Alert channel (Russian): https://t.me/thorchain_alert_rus
MCCN Bot: https://t.me/thor_infobot

Source code: https://github.com/tirinox/thorchainmonitorbot

THORCasino (working title)

We started developing an app to bring gamification to THORChain, motivating new members to add funds to the liquidity pools.
As for me, I am prototyping a simple lottery on the native blockchain which scans blocks and periodically draws small prizes among participants who have provided liquidity. More details will be published soon.

2021 recap

These are the features created and deployed in 2021:

NodeOp tools
Large swaps/switches/refunds notifications
Impermanent loss protection and fees were added to the LP yield module
THORNode software version tracker
Mimir tracker with human-readable information
Node diversity infographics
Inline mode for LP yield and basic network statistics
THORChain block time tracker
Daily networks and pools summaries
And many-many more small additions and bug fixes for the bot
Revival of the trader leaderboard (https://leaderboard.thornode.org/)
The Rise and Fall of the Aiothornode library
Funny stickers and laser-eyed avatars
THORGuards Chrome extension

Unfulfilled promises also took place. Sorry, it can happen to anyone. I’m a solo developer and can’t instantly implement all of my and the community’s ideas.

Conclusion

No doubt it was a challenging but interesting year.

I hope, that working integration with Slack will be introduced in the first quarter of ’22.

Node-Mimir voting progress will also appear in the notification channels. More plans are to analyze Rune native token flows.

We also plan to run a THORChain-based lottery and have some fun.

You can always write to me and suggest some new features for my products (https://t.me/account1242).

Whether the market is bullish or bearish, we still have a lot to build. This is our path to liberty and prosperity.