How To Schedule Transactions On MyCrypto.com
Now available on the Mainnet!
Chronologic has partnered with MyCrypto to introduce some of the Ethereum Alarm Clock functionality into MyCrypto — starting with adding an option to schedule transactions for the future. Someone would schedule a transaction for a variety of use-cases, such as contributing to an ICO without fear of missing a cut-off date. The functionality is now available on the Mainnet.
In this tutorial we will go through the whole process of scheduling a transaction for the future. We’ll start by creating a scheduled transaction and we will describe all of the necessary inputs. After that, we’ll finish up by showing how you can track the status of your scheduled transaction or even cancel it. Let’s start!
Scheduling a transaction
We’ll start by opening the MyCrypto wallet on https://mycrypto.com/. If it’s your first time visiting https://mycrypto.com/, you will get a series of instructions and warning on how to use the wallet. Make sure you read through those carefully. You will then be presented with the following screen:
Choose the appropriate method to access the wallet from which you want to send your scheduled transaction.
The regular MyCrypto Send screen will appear.
Pressing Send Later will open additional options for scheduling a transaction. Transactions can be scheduled either by block number or by date & time. Select Minutes or Blocks appropriately.
Besides the date & time (or block number). we get a number of additional fields we have to fill, each of which is required by the Ethereum Alarm Clock protocol to schedule a transaction. Let’s get into more detail about each of those.
- Window — defines a time-window in which the transaction has to be executed. A minimum time-window required by the Ethereum Alarm Clock protocol is 5 min (or about 20 blocks).
- Time Bounty — the amount of ETH you wish to offer to TimeNodes in exchange for execution. The higher the Time Bounty, the likelier it is that your transaction will get executed.
- Require Deposit — require that the TimeNode needs to deposit a given amount of ETH in order to gain an exclusive time window to execute your transaction. (This provides an additional guarantee that your transaction will be executed.)
- Future Gas Price — gas price that will be used when executing the transaction in the future.
- Future Gas Limit — gas limit that will be used when executing the transaction in the future.
After filling those in, pressing “Schedule Transaction” will trigger the creation of the scheduled transaction.
Congratulations, you’ve successfully scheduled a transaction for the future!
Tracking the status
Now that we have successfully scheduled a transaction, let’s see how we can keep track of it.
Once the transaction has been broadcast to the network, we get a small notification at the bottom guiding us to three different locations. We’ll take a look at two of those.
Verify (Etherscan)
Pressing this will take us to one of the most famous Ethereum blockchain explorers — Etherscan. We can see all the details of the scheduled transaction there.
Let’s make it clear what each of the addresses are:
- Address from which the transaction has been scheduled
- Ethereum Alarm Clock scheduler contract
- Contract that holds the funds and waits to be executed at a future point in time. This is the address that is used to reference this transaction in the following steps, so let’s store it somewhere safe.
Check on Chronos
Following this link takes us to the Chronos DApp, where we can have a more comprehensive view of our scheduled transaction. The Chronos DApp is highly integrated with the Ethereum Alarm Clock protocol and is used as a UI for the communication with the protocol.
As we can see from the screenshot above, the Chronos DApp provides us with all the information about the scheduled transaction formatted in a comprehensive way.
The most important thing to keep track of is the Status of the transaction — here we can see that the status has been set to Scheduled. If you want to keep track of the progress of your scheduled transaction, we advise bookmarking the link.
You can also cancel the scheduled transaction by clicking the Cancel button.
Checking the execution status
After the process of scheduling the transaction, you can just let it be and the Ethereum Alarm Clock will take care of the rest — making sure that the transaction is executed within the correct time-window.
But let’s say you want to check back in to make sure that the transaction has been executed. For this, we need the address of the scheduled transaction, so we find the address which we saved somewhere safe beforehand.
Let’s start by going to https://app.chronologic.network/ and pressing the Search button.
Pasting our scheduled transaction address into the search bar will lead us to the details of our transaction.
We can now see that our transaction has already been executed, and we are provided with the exact transaction hash of the executed transaction.
Following the hyperlink of the transaction hash leads us back to Etherscan.io, where we can see how the transaction got executed in detail.
Reading the To section on the executed transaction on Etherscan, we can see that three different transfers happened from the smart contract to other parties.
Transfer #1 points to the original amount scheduled to be sent, which in our case was 1 ETH.
Transfer #2 is the bounty paid out to the TimeNode, plus the refund of the deposit and gas costs. In our case the total amount is a bit lower than the total bounty + deposit because of the claim payment modifier.
Transfer #3 marks the refund of the remaining funds to the original account that scheduled the transaction.
