2023 was a milestone year for Chronicle; here’s what went down
Towards the close of 2023, we announced ourselves to the world.
What was already well known in data and DeFi circles as the Oracle Core Unit of MakerDAO was now Chronicle Protocol, and, for the first time, it was made available outside of the MakerDAO ecosystem.
Builders rejoice! Cost-efficient, verifiable Oracles are finally here.
Internally, this was coined as our public launch. Creative, I know.
This entailed launching the new brand (expertly crafted with the team at StaffOnly) and educating users on the unique selling points of the Oracle primitive we’ve been working on for the last two years, i.e., Cost-efficient, verifiable Oracles.
But also on an engineering level, pushing the protocol live and releasing the repos into the wild. Nervewracking is one word. Exciting is another!
Chronicle Protocol is operational, securing around $8bn at the time of writing, yet very much in development. The goal of the public launch was twofold:
- Switch up the narrative on Oracles. Oracles should be more accessible, affordable, and transparent.
- Raise awareness of Chronicle Protocol, and its new Oracle primitive, Scribe, as a prelude to business development and collaboration.
This is how it unfolded.
Hello, world…
Naturally, the launch kicked off with a press release, and we were delighted with the pickup from CoinDesk, Coin Telegraph, Blockworks, Yahoo Finance, Unchained, and many more.
With this came a slew of educational content around our progress with the ‘Oracle Problem’ and how and where you can explore Chronicle Protocol for yourself, via The Chronicle (AKA the dashboard).
This included pieces in The Block, Decrypt, and an interview with The Defiant — we would be remiss not to recognize the great quality of The Defiant’s Explainer Video, which Jack Duman expertly put together.
And, if you want to learn more about what we are working on at Chronicle Labs and our vision for Oracles into 2024 and beyond, these articles and videos will serve you well!
If a technical deep dive is more your speed, check out these research reports from Messari and Token Terminal.
Event season
Digital footprint established, next up, it was time to get out and meet people in person, and where better to start than at ETH Warsaw, a burgeoning Ethereum gathering co-founded by one of our lead engineers, Paweł Zaremba.
During a keynote, Niklas presented a first look at Chronicle Protocol and our shiny new dashboard, which you can watch above. We also participated in the Hackathon and had our first projects build with Chronicle Oracles.
The winners came up with an impressively creative use case for our ETH/USD and stETH/USD Oracles to create data for an insurance protocol that would cover solo ETH speakers, providing a yield in light of not being selected to create a new block.
Soon after ETH Warsaw, we had the pleasure of keynoting at both Permissionless II in Austin, TX and Dappcon in Berlin. It was time to introduce Chronicle to the USA and continue our tour of Europe.
The green-pilling continued earnestly in New York, where we introduced Chronicle’s thesis for Oracle infrastructure to power RWAs (Real World Assets).
We are working closely with our partners on this development, one of which is Centrifuge, and we were delighted to be invited to their inaugural RWA Summit at the historic William Vale Hotel.
Live now at the #RWASummit, Chronicle Founder @nomos_paradox is discussing #stablecoins and #RWAs with @SteakhouseFi, @circle, @KintoXYZ & @centrifuge #RWA #RealWorldAssets #DeFi pic.twitter.com/mCEuETHL6J
— Chronicle Protocol 📖 (@ChronicleLabs) September 19, 2023
This was closely followed up with a panel during Messari Mainnet 2023 entitled ‘What is the RWA Endgame?’ — aptly so considering our involvement with Maker’s Endgame — and a judging assignment during ETH Global NYC.
It was a short hop from New York across the pond to London, UK. The RWA narrative continued with another speaking opportunity, this time at the Crypto Compare Digital Asset Summit.
Meanwhile, our resident Brit, Angus Tookey, presented a keynote at the UK’s largest crypto conference, Zebu Live.
While our Founder, Niklas, hot-footed it back to his base of operations in Milan, Italy, to introduce Chronicle to Southern Europe via ETH Milan.
🎙️ Relive the best talks from ETHMilan 2023! 📷
— ETHMilan 🇮🇹 | Q4 2024 (@eth_milano) January 6, 2024
✨ @nomos_paradox from @ChronicleLabs
for a bite-sized on "Chronicle Oracles: Don't Trust, Verify" 💡https://t.co/e7uWf2WVUe
The Chronicle tour of Southern Europe wasn’t yet complete, with an invitation to the European Blockchain Convention and their Start-Up Competition, which, despite the protocol being around since 2017, Chronicle qualified for as a newly formed entity with no fundraising.
The format for this competition was a 3-minute presentation with 2 minutes of questions, and it proved to be a great exercise for us to hone in on Chronicle’s core proposition. We entered to test ourselves but were amazed to come away as the competition's winners, which had over 500 entrants.
Aaaand the winner of the #EBC9 Startup Battle iiiiis.....@ChronicleLabs 🥇 🏆 🎉
— European Blockchain Convention (@EBlockchainCon) October 26, 2023
Huge congrats to @nomos_paradox and the whole team at Chronicle 👏
Thanks to all the 50 startups participating. It has been an extremely difficult choice for our judges to pick the winner.
Stay… pic.twitter.com/r7vqjbvH9P
The launch kicked off at the beginning of September, and it’s incredible to think the European Blockchain Convention in Barcelona only took us to the end of October. A lot had been achieved over the first two months, and momentum was building.
With Chronicle firmly introduced at all the largest crypto events in the US and Europe during this period, our only audience left to build with was the builders themselves — which meant hackathons!
November started with ETH Lisbon, a fantastic event that brought together around 300 hackers in Portugal’s capital. The response we experienced was humbling, with over 20 projects building with Chronicle Oracles. It was a moment that demonstrated to us that the tireless work from the team on both business and engineering was starting to pay off.
ETH Lisbon culminated with the joy that is tacos. Together with Nerif Network, we hosted a private party for 150 guests at Lisbon’s most tasty tacoria.
And with hackathon three of 2023 down, there was only one hackathon to go — the biggest and best of them all, Devconnect and ETH Global Istanbul.
Perhaps only Devcon can challenge Devconnect as our most loved week of the year, so we’re grateful the EF hosts them in alternating years! Oracles are inherently technical, making Devconnect the perfect place to discuss our advances with the cryptography that underpins them.
Monday through Friday was packed with talks and panels, wrapping up at the weekend with a hackathon for the ages. There was a common theme throughout: educating developers on the ‘Oracle Problem’ breakthrough that Schnorr signatures enable.
The first venue was the EVM Summit.
Which was followed shortly after by TrustX by Secureum where Nik presented to the blockchain security community.
Meanwhile, Paweł was delivering a workshop at the Nethermind summit, playfully named ‘How oracles can hug you or rug you’ that aimed to educate on the design considerations for Oracles.
Our growth and ecosystem lead, Jen Senhaji, took to the stage at the unStable Summit discussing the key role Oracles play for stablecoins.
Whereas, Angus, our marketing lead took part in an Ask the Builders AMA at the EpicWeb3 ETH Infra Day.
Nik hoped aboard a boat on the Bosphorus, before closing out a busy week with a panel at Open Data Gunu discussing on and off-chain data flow.
The stage was set, and there was only one event left to go: ETH Global Istanbul, the largest Hackathon of 2023.
ETHGlobal Istanbul will see one of the largest prize pool in ETHGlobal history.
— ETHGlobal (@ETHGlobal) October 25, 2023
🏆 625,000 USD 🏆 are up for grabs.
Are you ready to hack the future of Ethereum?
Applications are closing soon: https://t.co/TnXukO8WOK pic.twitter.com/0l3xRAoqXi
The team was out in full force, bolstered with the holy trinity of SWAG— stickers, shirts, and socks.
Nik delivered a short keynote during the Opening Ceremony to introduce Chronicle and our bounties to the almost 1500 hackers in attendance.
And with that, the hackathon officially started. And what a weekend it was! We met many enthusiastic and talented people, caught up with our friends and partners in the space, and after two days of hacking, we had our 1st prize winner.
Trevor Keith (a team of one!) utilized our new Scribe Oracle to create Autogov, a governance platform that uses AI to convert English text DAO proposals into code in a trusted way (inc. transactions!).
We love nothing more than innovative use cases for our Oracles (hint, hint if you want to grab a prize at ETH Denver!). Congratulations to Trevor, and the 15 other projects that successfully integrated Chronicle at the event.
On to 2024 with renewed vigor!
Considering that most people had not heard of Chronicle Protocol when we kicked off our public launch in September of 2023, we closed out the year feeling hugely encouraged.
The response to our brand, thesis, and, most importantly, our product has been exceptional. From the many conversations we had at these events, it became clear that a vast number of Oracle users in the market are unsatisfied with the state of Oracle providers.
The space needs a radical redesign, not just more varied or lower-latency Oracles.
Following a well-earned rest over the Christmas period, we roll into 2024. The team is back at it and lining up our first deployments of Scribe on new blockchains (outside of Ethereum), kicking off with Polygon zkEVM, and redacted, redacted, and redacted shortly after 👀. With many more to come.
Finally, we’ll leave you with this.
In the wise words of Barry Silbert. “Going to be a big [year].”
About Chronicle Protocol
Chronicle Protocol is a novel Oracle solution that has exclusively secured over $10B in assets for MakerDAO and its ecosystem since 2017. With a history of innovation, including the invention of the first Oracle on Ethereum, Chronicle Protocol continues to redefine Oracles. A blockchain-agnostic protocol, Chronicle overcomes the current limitations of transferring data on-chain by developing the first truly scalable, cost-efficient, decentralized, and verifiable Oracles, rewriting the rulebook on data transparency and accessibility.
For more information about Chronicle, visit chroniclelabs.org, the community discussion channel, and Twitter.