Chronicle Protocol recently made a splash in the blockchain Oracle space and has been the exclusive supplier to MakerDAO for over 6 years.。MakerDAO has now spun off its Oracle team to Chronicle, and its extensive data bridging and interoperability services are now open to all Web3 builders for the first time.。

While Chronicle is a new brand, its original Oracle was the first Oracle on Ethereum in 2017, and the technology behind the protocol has been proven, raising as much as $20 billion for MakerDAO at the peak of the cryptocurrency market in 2021.。Chronicle doesn't rely entirely on this impressive reputation, and their recent launch is backed by some groundbreaking advances in blockchain Oracle engineering that will upend the current landscape.。

What is Oracles's pain point?？

"Oracles" has long been considered an Achilles heel for Defi, where decentralized protocols built to run autonomously do not need to be trusted through code, but still need to port reliable data sources to their applications, and using external Oracle systems to provide critical data has been a friction point.。

The risk of financial loss from Oracle manipulation is a real concern for Defi builders, and the emergence of the "non-Oracle" protocol indicates an attempt to eliminate this attack vector.。While these designs offer trust-minimizing solutions that are positive in some applications, they are not one-size-fits-all solutions。So the real job must be to improve the current Oracle design。At Chronicle, we are addressing Oracle's top three challenges: security, decentralization, and cost。

How Chronicle is different from Pyth and Chainlink？

Defi's permissibility is its best attribute, i.e. there are no barriers to core financial services such as lending, trading and saving。What makes the permissionless system work is full transparency, and the ability to verify the value of digital currencies at any time without having to trust any central entity or wait for business hours is a major improvement.。

By porting data from different environments to applications that encode rules to manage the behavior of value in them, rules play a vital role in the pipeline of decentralized systems。For example, liquidation is triggered when a loan agreement must liquidate the borrower's position because the collateral falls below the threshold set by the agreement, and the trigger point is determined by Oracle。

Chronicle prioritizes verifiability, security, and cost-effectiveness from the beginning of its design。Anyone can view the process of sourcing, validating, and providing data through the Chronicle panel, which shows the end-to-end process of Oracle updates。For example, we can see the total value locked in the agreement or stablecoin-backed assets, and we should be able to see the source of all the data used by Oracle.。

An underlying technical aspect that distinguishes Chronicle from existing Oracle vendors is its ability to scale without increasing costs。To date, Oracle systems have been limited by the linear relationship between the number of price validators they can contain and the transaction cost of updating Oracle。This means that the more validators (actors who query the data source through the Oracle system and provide prices to the dApp), the higher the transaction cost of updating Oracles on the chain。

Because each verifier must sign an encrypted message stating the price they are querying (i.e. ETH / USD) in order to report to Oracle and update the on-chain price。The more information signed, the higher the cost of the Oracle transaction because it contains more data (more signatures)。

Other Oracle providers address this cost challenge by limiting the number of validators participating in the transaction。However, by limiting the number of validators, security needs to be weighed, because the smaller the set of validators, the easier it is to be manipulated。The more validators, the higher the security。

Chronicle solves this problem by implementing a proprietary signature mechanism that allows the verifier signature to be compressed into a "super" signature while retaining all the information in each verifier signature。This allows Chronicles Oracle updates to cost 2-5 times less than leading Oracle providers, while increasing security by not capping the number of validators involved。

Just as the Ethereum network itself will become more decentralized and secure as verifiers increase, Chronicles can add more high-quality verifiers without increasing costs。Chronicle validators are also an intentional part of its open and transparent design, most of which are well-known and reputable Defi operators such as Gitcoin, Defi Saver, Maker, Argent, and Gnosis.。

The Long-term Vision and Causes of Chronicle Protocol

Chronicle builds long-term scalable systems from initial principles。Like the MakerDAO protocol from which it originated, Chronicle's architecture does not take shortcuts。It was built to serve the future state of Defi, not just today (it is only a small part of finance), but the system running in the future world。

The amount of data moved between the application and the network will largely depend on Oracles. In fact, Oracles is a messaging platform that transfers data from point A to point B and verifies it。The data types that Oracles can support are not limited to cryptocurrency prices, as long as there is a way to access and create a data model, it can track almost any data type。

Because of its relationship with Maker, Chronicle became one of the first Oracles to service RWA (real-world asset) loans on-chain through Maker.。The RWA vertical market is expected to be a huge driver of value on the chain. Chronicle is currently using the high-quality technology it has developed for price feedback Oracles to develop data verification solutions。

As billions of value on the chain become trillions of value, the infrastructure that provides and transmits data must have tight security and unlimited scalability, while the cost cannot be too high, and only a few people can afford it. This becomes more important.。The whole point of DeFi and Web3 is to increase transparency and accessibility, and Chronicle will play a key role in this transition。