When Ethereum was created, it wasn’t designed to initially include scheduled transactions. Piper Merriam envisioned the Ethereum Alarm Clock protocol to address those limitations. ChronoLogic partnered with Merriam to continue the development of the Ethereum Alarm Clock and now it has reached a major milestone. One can now schedule ERC20 token transfers on the Kovan Test Network. Pending a security audit, this functionality will soon be available on the main net.

At the present growth stage of Ethereum, there are over 1000 known ERC20 tokens and over 68000 deployed on the mainnet.

The Ethereum ecosystem is only growing, and as the number of ERC20 tokens grows, the demand for scheduling tokens for things such as monthly salary payments, bounty releases, and staking will grow as well.

Staking is any system in which owned tokens are locked (staked) under pre-determined conditions, for whatever agreed reason. The scheduling could come in at different points in the process, either at entry or exit to accomplish certain actions during the staking period. Any timed action could be scheduled.

ChronoLogic is unaware of any on-chain solution for ERC20 Token transfer. There are off-chain solutions, which usually have the issue of a centralized point of failure such as a server failure…and insecurity.

ChronoLogic developer Anthony Adegbemi led the ERC20 Token Transfer development. When asked how it was achieved, Anthony replied:

“The Ethereum Alarm Clock, by default, receives the bytes to be sent to any address. In this case, we generated and provided the bytecode representing the transfer transaction. Then we granted the newly deployed scheduled contract permission to successfully send the bytecode.”

During the Ethereum Community Conference in Paris, ChronoLogic conducted a number of interviews with Ethereum leaders. “Scheduling token transfers” was a subject that came up a lot in those interviews, indicating demand and need for the functionality.

To see a tutorial on how to schedule ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum Alarm Clock dApp (on the Kovan testnet) see the following video:

As always, we welcome collaboration with developers on Github. Join our communities on Telegram and Twitter to get the latest news about when this functionality will go to the main net.

We would also love for you to send us a message on Telegram about your idea for a use-case for how ERC20 token transfers could be scheduled to solve a problem.