CycleOps allows you to automate your cycles management by creating rules that determine when your canisters should be topped up, but what should the parameters of your rule be, and generally how should one think about this problem?
To make things simple for you, CycleOps offers presets that are geared towards different types of projects. You can choose from any of these presets when creating a new top-up rule, or when editing an existing rule. Here a few light suggestions that we provide, and when you should consider using each of them:
If below 1T, top-up with 0.5T.
Sometimes we release a simple little project that slowly sips cycles and doesn’t need a lot of insurance.
If below 10T, top-up with 1T.
For a production canister, we likely want to have a higher freezing threshold for extra redundancy, and perhaps a healthy buffer of cycles in case something exciting happens. 🎉
If below 30T, top-up with 10T.
Token canisters should be considered high-stakes contracts. They can generally be thought of as a financial asset, and loss of state would be equivalent to loss of property for all holders ❌. For this reason, you should ensure that any token canisters have a very aggressive freezing threshold, which will ensure a very large buffer for people to notice a problem before the entire canister state is deleted.
Depends on your anticipated cycles burn and application growth rate
Factory canisters can burn large amounts of cycles in a short amount of time depending on the use case. For this reason, we recommend setting both high thresholds and top-up amounts to ensure you don’t fall behind easily. Reach out to us via our Discord or at [email protected] if you fall into this category and have any questions.
These presets are intended to give you jumping-off points to get started with, but eventually you will probably want to fine tune your rules 🔧 to meet your specific needs. Here are some things to keep in mind.
When creating a top-up rule, you can specify that a canister should be sent a specific quantity of cycles, or that it should be sent enough cycles such that it tops up to an approximate cycles balance.
When creating or editing a top-up rule, select “by amount” to create a rule that sends a set amount of cycles to the canister. For example, you might create a rule to “top up by 2T cycles when below 1T cycles.” With this rule, whenever your canister falls below a 1T cycles balance, CycleOps will initiate a top up for 2T cycles.
Alternatively you might create a “to balance” top-up rule (feature coming soon), which sends enough cycles such that the canister will be restored to a certain balance by receiving the top-up. For example, a rule to “top up to 2T cycles when below 1T cycles” will send ~1T cycles if your canister falls below 1T.