In Q4 of 2023, we opened up access to the protocol outside of MakerDAO for the first time and, with it, announced that Scribe, our groundbreaking new Oracle, would launch first on Polygon zkEVM.
Now, after an extended period of setup, testing, and staging, we are proud to push Scribe into prod - starting with Polygon zkEVM.
Polygon zkEVM has experienced rapid growth since its launch, building TVL, dapp deployments, and noteworthy integrations of the CDK.
Chronicle Oracles, currently securing over $7.5b of TVL, will bring the same security and trust assumptions that power MakerDAO and others to Polygon zkEVM, providing a decentralized, verifiable, and cost-efficient network for the transmission of on-chain data.
The TL;DR on Scribe
Choosing an Oracle to secure your protocol and its TVL is the most important consideration of them all. With that in mind, we’ve prepared a short rundown of the questions every Oracle user should have definitive, verifiable answers to:
Where does the data come from?
Chronicle Scribe displays every data source in real-time and historically via The Chronicle, our on-chain dashboard. Pick an Oracle, choose a time and date on the graph, and hit the drop-down arrow on any validator to see which exchanges they queried for the price data.
Oracle providers that use low volume and low liquidity exchanges or liquidity pools for data sources are the reason behind most DeFi protocol attacks. Every Oracle protocol should provide complete data source transparency to their users, and in a cryptographically verifiable way - not just words and images. Don’t trust, verify.
How many validators or signers does the protocol have?
At Chronicle, we refer to these protocol actors as validators. By other providers, they are sometimes referred to as signers or Oracles. Essentially, these are the actors that operate the nodes on the protocol that attest (or sign) to the integrity of the reported data (such as the price of BTC/USD at a specific time).
This is how to establish truth in an Oracle network. Enough of these nodes must report back with the requested data to develop a consensus. However, if a bad actor can gain control of the majority of these nodes, they can manipulate the reported data. Therefore, the more validators or nodes an Oracle protocol has and the more distributed (or decentralized) they are, the more secure it is from being hacked.
Using The Chronicle, anyone can see who Chronicle Protocol’s validators are, which cryptocurrency pairs or Oracles they are sourcing data for, and when their reported data was last updated.
Scribe is the first Oracle design to pioneer the use of Schnoor signatures. This allows Chronicle Protocol to scale to an unlimited number of validators. No other Oracle protocol can achieve this as they all use an implementation of ECDSA that has a linear relationship between the number of validators and the cost of operating the Oracle.
As a result, validator or signer numbers are low to keep costs down, sacrificing better security and decentralization.
Who are the protocol validators or signers
Knowing the identity of the validators is just as important as the total number. This is because an actor running a node can report any data they please. For example, they could have the node report that BTC is worth $10,000 when the market value is $40,000, creating an attack vector and draining the DeFi protocol that Oracle ‘secures.’
Therefore, decentralized and distributed nodes should be at the top of your Oracle provider shopping list unless you want your Oracle provider to have the power to drain your project. Right now, there is more than one Oracle provider that runs all or the majority of their protocol’s nodes themselves, securing millions of dollars of TVL. Nothing stops them from draining your project if they get compromised or go rogue.
At Chronicle, all of our validators are identifiable, and many are operated by well-known brands with a good reputation and track record—projects such as MakerDAO, Infura, Gnosis, Gitcoin, Etherscan, and DeFi Saver. Our goal is to create a validator community of some of the most used protocols in the space, creating a positive feedback loop of increasing security and decentralization.
What does it cost to operate the Oracles?
Oracles are very gas-hungry. For example, every time the BTC/USD Oracle (or Feed) updates to the latest price, this has a gas cost as it is required to post the result on-chain. Regardless of L1 or L2, the more updates, the more cost, and the Oracle provider shoulders that cost. Therefore, many Oracle providers look to update the data less frequently. This creates stale data and opens up opportunities for arbitrage, with both the Dapp and the user of the Dapp losing out.
With Scribe, we have tackled the underlying engineering problem behind the high cost of operating Oracles. The result is an Oracle that costs up to 6x less than Chainlink to update and 3.5x less than Pyth (on L1 and L2). This was achieved using Schnoor signatures - to read more about that, check out this research report by Token Terminal.
More than ‘marketing’
Scribe represents a legitimate breakthrough in the so-called “Oracle Problem,” and we’re delighted to bring it to Polygon zkEVM first.
If you’re interested in bolstering your protocol, DeFi Dapp, or anything else with a custom Oracle designed by Chronicle, or would like to integrate any of our existing real-time price feeds, please reach out to your Polygon ecosystem representative - or connect with us directly in Discord or via email to [email protected]
About Polygon Labs:
Polygon Labs develops Ethereum scaling solutions for Polygon protocols. Polygon Labs engages with other ecosystem developers to help make available scalable, affordable, secure and sustainable blockchain infrastructure for Web3. Polygon Labs has initially developed a growing suite of protocols for developers to gain easy access to major scaling solutions, including Layer 2s (zero-knowledge rollups), sidechains, app-specific chains and data availability protocols. Scaling solutions that Polygon Labs initially developed have seen widespread adoption with tens of thousands of decentralized apps, unique addresses exceeding 327 million, 1.6 million smart contracts created and 2.9 billion total transactions processed since inception. The existing Polygon network is home for some of the biggest Web3 projects, such as Aave, Uniswap, and OpenSea, and well-known enterprises, including Robinhood, Stripe and Adobe.
If you're an Ethereum Developer, you're already a Polygon developer! Leverage Polygon’s fast and secure txns for dApps you develop, get started here.
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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.
