The Essence and Application of Trigger Operators

Trigger operators are an important component of smart contracts. When the internal logic of a contract meets certain conditions, external actions are needed to change the state of the contract. This is determined by the nature of smart contracts under the architecture of Satoshi Nakamoto: each operation is a global auction. Many designs that attempt to automate triggers have not deeply considered this game-theoretic issue. If forced sorting is applied, it may lead to game conflicts, resulting in attacks or arbitrage; more fundamentally, there exist dominant strategies for on-chain behavior.

The essence of the trigger operator is based on the exchange of GAS consumption, information carrying costs, and the benefits of state changes, and this exchange is non-linear in terms of scale. Due to its non-linear characteristics, we need to explore whether it is possible to form self-enhancement in some dimension, thereby solidifying value.

Trigger operators typically consist of three aspects:

1. Is it subject to rights: Are the triggered objects restricted? For example, in lending, the repayment trigger can only be executed by the borrower, while liquidation can be triggered by anyone.

2. Whether to carry information: Whether to pass information to the contract when triggered, including assets. Carrying information may increase triggering costs, especially when carrying assets, which will at least involve the cost of financial risk.

3. Temporal relevance: Whether the validity of the trigger is related to time. The stronger the temporal relevance, the more it will affect the triggering strategy.

In DeFi design, the trigger operator is often defined as the third-party behavior of the game, primarily used for liquidation. This brings about the issue of incentive design. Different scenarios will design different incentive mechanisms, especially regarding whether to incorporate information costs and time effects. A trigger based entirely on information costs may result in miners becoming the ultimate beneficiaries, while a trigger based on time effects can be designed as a Dutch auction structure, allowing most of the value to belong to the actual triggerers.

In addition to liquidation, the trigger operator has another important function: automatic hedging. This aspect has not yet been deeply practiced in the industry and is a field where the core value of the trigger operator remains to be explored. Furthermore, the trigger operator that creates information or actively contributes information is also an important application. Over time, due to its non-linearity and broad applicability, the trigger operator is expected to become the first on-chain operator to capture value.

A question worth pondering is: can a trigger operator independently constitute a GAME? Since each trigger operator is related to a specific scenario, it is difficult to achieve this under a unified incentive system. This is different from Ethereum, which specifies how much GAS each instruction consumes, because the latter first standardizes the underlying instructions and then reversely selects the contract structure. If we want to build an independent trigger operator GAME, it requires different trigger scenarios to design the trigger model according to the same standards, ensuring the consistency of input and output values. This is difficult to achieve unless all contracts are formulated under the same standards.

Overall, the nonlinear structure of trigger operators can be combined with large contracts to form a certain self-enhancing non-cooperative game, and possesses significant economic value. However, it cannot independently complete the design of a GAME and accumulate value. From this perspective, some existing products have logical issues, turning into internal lottery systems. In the future, there is still broad exploration space for the application and value capture of trigger operators.