A look into keepers and liquidations

Decentralization of finance is primarily associated with the ability to use smart contracts on blockchains. However, smart contracts by themselves are not capable of supporting protocols' operation. They do not have access to information from the outside world and also, at least on Ethereum, cannot initiate transactions. For these reasons, DeFi needs keepers who will execute some transactions for them to exist successfully.

Keepers are very closely related to Miner extractable value (MEV) because they extract profit from on-chain transactions. Some of them already share profits with miners through Flashbots or ArcherDAO, while others seem to negotiate directly with pools. Except in some cases, keepers have deservedly split $319.8M+ in revenues since the beginning of 2020.