Tracking Deposits

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Apart from sending transactions, an exchange also needs a way to listen for transactions sent to their addresses (deposits). We won't cover how this can be done for ERC20-like smart contracts on Zilliqa in this tutorial, but the same strategy can be applied.

Info

The code in this tutorial is derived from the example application.

Setting Up

To implement a simple and familiar polling mechanism in Node.js, we will use a few additional dependencies:

npm i node-cron p-map lodash

Implementing the Handler Function

We will use a simple class called DepositCron to set up our cron job. We'll start by implementing a handler method, aptly named handler.

export class DepositCron {
  addresses: string[] = [];
  frequency: string = "* * * * *";
  svc: ZilliqaService;
  task: cron.ScheduledTask;
  // you should persist the last fetched block to a database, and initialise
  // this cron job with that block number, to avoid fetch all blocks from 0 to
  // present.
  lastFetchedTxBlock: number = 0;

  constructor(frequency: string, svc: ZilliqaService, addresses: string[]) {
    this.frequency = frequency;
    this.svc = svc;
    this.addresses = addresses;
  }

  async handler() {
    const currentTxBlock = await this.svc.getTxBlock();
    console.log("Current tx block: ", currentTxBlock);
    if (currentTxBlock > this.lastFetchedTxBlock) {
      // get transactions from lastFetchedTxBlock + 1 to current, and set
      // lastFetchedTxBlock to current
      const transactions = await pMap(
        range(this.lastFetchedTxBlock + 1, currentTxBlock),
        (blk) => this.svc.getDeposits(this.addresses, blk),
      ).then(flatten);

      this.lastFetchedTxBlock = currentTxBlock;

      // we are only logging to stdout, but in a real application, you would
      // be writing the result to the database.
      console.log(
        `Found ${transactions.length} deposits for ${this.addresses}`,
      );
    }
  }
}

Let's unpack handler. We are taking several steps:

1. Fetch the current TxBlock.
2. We compare the value of the current TxBlock against the one we have recorded using lastFetchedTxBlock.
3. If there is a difference, we fetch all transactions that have been processed between lastFetchedTxBlock + 1 and the current TxBlock
4. i.e., everyone transaction we have missed.
5. We then call svc.getDeposits for every transaction processed in that span of blocks. It compares the toAddr property of each transaction against the addresses array we passed to the constructor, checking if it contains our toAddr. If so, then a transaction to an address we are interested in has occurred.

Starting the Cron Job

So far we have no way of starting up or controlling our CronJob. We'll do that by implementing start, stop, and nuke methods.

export class DepositCron {
  addresses: string[] = [];
  frequency: string = "* * * * *";
  svc: ZilliqaService;
  task: cron.ScheduledTask;
  // you should persist the last fetched block to a database, and initialise
  // this cron job with that block number, to avoid fetch all blocks from 0 to
  // present.
  lastFetchedTxBlock: number = 0;

  constructor(frequency: string, svc: ZilliqaService, addresses: string[]) {
    this.frequency = frequency;
    this.svc = svc;
    this.addresses = addresses;
    this.task = cron.schedule(this.frequency, this.handler.bind(this));
  }

  async handler() {
    const currentTxBlock = await this.svc.getTxBlock();
    console.log("Current tx block: ", currentTxBlock);
    if (currentTxBlock > this.lastFetchedTxBlock) {
      // get transactions from lastFetchedTxBlock + 1 to current, and set
      // lastFetchedTxBlock to current
      const transactions = await pMap(
        range(this.lastFetchedTxBlock + 1, currentTxBlock),
        (blk) => this.svc.getDeposits(this.addresses, blk),
      ).then(flatten);

      this.lastFetchedTxBlock = currentTxBlock;

      // we are only logging to stdout, but in a real application, you would
      // be writing the result to the database.
      console.log(
        `Found ${transactions.length} deposits for ${this.addresses}`,
      );
    }
  }

  async start() {
    this.task.start();
  }

  async stop() {
    this.task.stop();
  }

  async nuke() {
    this.task.destroy();
  }
}

Now that we have our methods, we can use the cron job like so:

// app.ts
// initialise services

const zilliqaSvc = new services.ZilliqaService(
  "https://stress-test-api.aws.z7a.xyz",
  {
    [config.get("mnemonic")]: 8,
  },
);

// boot up cron jobs
// these can also be destroyed
const depositCron = new crons.DepositCron("* * * * *", zilliqaSvc);
depositCron.start();