Chronicle Protocol - The First Oracle on Ethereum: What You Need to Know
$7B TVS, RWA Pivot, & More
Chronicle Protocol is a decentralized oracle network designed to bring accurate, verifiable real-world data onto blockchains. It was originally built in 2017 as the internal oracle system for MakerDAO, and the first oracle on Ethereum.
The protocol was developed under the leadership of Niklas Kunkel, who was the Head of Oracles at the Maker Foundation. When the foundation dissolved in 2021 as part of its transition to full decentralization, several core teams, including Chronicle, began operating independently.
Today, Chronicle Labs operates as an independent oracle project securing over $7B on-chain and is the second-largest oracle service provider behind Chainlink.
In this edition, we'll discuss the Chronicle’s architecture, analyze protocol performance metrics, and more…
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Overview
Back in 2017, reliable on-chain data infrastructure was still in its infancy. The Maker team needed a secure way to feed external price data into its smart contracts to support the launch of SAI (now called DAI). Chronicle was developed to meet this need, becoming one of the earliest functioning oracle systems in the space.
Chronicle currently has a Total Value Secured (TVS) of over $7B, providing oracle services to top protocols such as Sky, Sparklend, Morpho, M^0, and many more.
They have a total of 1313 supported asset oracles, and 25 Validators, including Etherscan, Gnosis, MakerDAO, and more.
Chronicle’s Differentiated Positioning in the Oracle Space
Chronicle’s long-term vision is to become the most trusted oracle infrastructure for tokenized real-world assets, which is a market that is growing rapidly and will demand oracles with institutional-grade transparency, uptime, and auditability.
Unlike most oracle networks that rely on opaque aggregation logic or centralized infrastructure at key junctures, Chronicle is engineered to be fully transparent and verifiable at every step from data sourcing to reporting to when it gets published on-chain.
This is achieved through:
On-chain publication of signed data by individual reporters.
A verifiable contract that aggregates data transparently.
Clear economic accountability: data providers are identified, and misbehavior is slashable.
Ensuring Verifiability with Chronicle’s Architecture
At its core, 3 main components make up the Oracle architecture:
1. Validators are permissioned data providers that source and sign data off-chain. These are whitelisted parties that can be held accountable for the data they provide, thus providing a layer of provable accountability which most oracle systems don’t provide.
2. Archivers receive signed values from validators and publish a median aggregated price as the canonical value feed. The values are stored in a database that is publicly available.
3. Challengers are users who question the validity of data reported by the validator. If a challenger believes a validator's data is incorrect or dishonest, they can initiate a challenge to verify the validator's signature. If the challenge is successful, the challenger receives a reward, and the dishonest validator is penalized.
Scribe is Chronicle's proprietary Oracle architecture designed to optimize gas efficiency, scalability, and decentralization. Traditional Oracle designs face a trade-off between decentralization and cost, as each additional validator increases on-chain signature data, driving up gas fees. Scribe eliminates this constraint using aggregated Schnorr signatures (allows to verify the Oracle instead of a single validator) to produce a single composite signature authenticated via ECDSA. This reduces data footprint and achieves near-constant gas costs across both Layer 1s and Layer 2s.
Real-World Asset Pivot
Tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) have re-emerged as one of crypto’s most promising narratives, driven by institutional interest, improved infrastructure, and rising on-chain demand for yield-bearing instruments like Treasury bills and tokenized funds (e.g., BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Maker’s own RWA vaults).
Chronicle is positioning itself as an infrastructure provider in this transition through its Verified Asset Oracle (VAO). The VAO is designed to support the secure onboarding of real-world financial data such as T-bills, fiat, and gold.
Chronicle’s VAO already has partnerships with several top RWA protocols, including:
M^0: Protocol behind the cryptodollar $M.
Superstate: An asset management firm focusing on tokenized financial products.
Centrifuge: A tokenized asset launchpad.
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