There are many reasons why a person would want to schedule a smart contract such as a crypto-payment for the future. Developers may be familiar with cron, but if you’re not, click here. People who set up and maintain software environments use cron to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts) to run periodically at fixed times, dates, or intervals.

Since there’s no way to run ‘cron’ trustlessly, the Ethereum Alarm Clock creates an incentive to call functions at given time periods.

On Ethereum, there is no built-in way to have a contract be called periodically, say every five blocks, or at a specific time in the future. The Ethereum Alarm Clock creates a market of TimeNodes, who compete to execute contracts at specified time intervals.

With the Ethereum Alarm Clock, you can have an Ethereum contract that facilitates scheduling function calls for a specified block in the future. Furthermore, function calls can be scheduled to be executed against any contract. And the thing that makes it trustless, reliable, and secure is that it is fully contained within the Ethereum network.

If you’re not a developer, you still might have a need for the Ethereum Alarm Clock.

For example, you might want to participate in an ICO, but you won’t be available to manually send the ETH at the time of the contribution window.

A person had that exact problem and asked Parity if they had to be online to schedule the payment with their solution. According to this Github response, the answer was an unfortunate “yes”. However, we can’t always be connected to the internet at the exact moment we want something to happen. And relying on being online at the specified time means that you become vulnerable to power outages, server failure, and other problems that could prevent the transaction from being executed at the specified time.

With the Ethereum Alarm Clock, you do not have to be online at the time of the transaction execution because you are not the one executing the transaction, a TimeNode is. What is a TimeNode?

A TimeNode is a 3rd party, anyone who owns at least 333 DAY tokens and runs a client in their browser.

They earn a gas bounty for executing your transaction for you. A TimeNode does not require any dedicated equipment.

The benefits of the Ethereum Alarm Clock are security, reliability and ease of use. Other schedulers have not been through years of development and testing. Smart contracts are complex and its best to go with a project that can reliably execute transactions, especially when dealing with funds.

Technically, a person could create their own script to schedule transactions, but how many people have the time and knowledge to do that and can hope for results which are as reliable as the Ethereum Alarm Clock?

Time is money. Outsourcing your transaction scheduling to the Ethereum Alarm Clock will save time, effort, energy, and money.

Cool services such as Oraclize.it have some offchain scheduling functionality but as you will hear in ChronoLogic’s interview with the founder of Oraclize, he believes the Ethereum Alarm Clock is a more reliable way of scheduling.

The Ethereum Alarm Clock is a completely decentralized and on-chain solution to transaction scheduling, which brings all of the benefits that blockchain technology is known for, such as trustlessness and the inability to be censored by governments.

Check out ChronoLogic’s Github and feel free to contribute to the continued development of the Ethereum Alarm Clock. Consider being a TimeNode, who executes transactions for others (for a bounty). And remember to join our communities on Telegram and Twitter to get the latest information on when the Ethereum Alarm Clock will integrate with MyCrypto.com and other major Ethereum wallets.