Few blockchain Oracle providers have gone through the trouble of creating a dashboard, allowing anyone to glean insight into what is happening to generate the final value the Oracle reports. This lack of transparency is troubling.
Where providers have created something, it appears more of a marketing exercise than a valid window into the protocol.
As a starting point, an Oracle data dashboard should display the provenance of where the data originated, how the protocol landed on the reported value, and the option to cryptographically verify the Oracle update's signature, proving the reported data's validity and integrity.
We designed Chronicle Protocol to do this in real-time and historically by storing archived data for all price feed Oracles. This allows users to find any reported historical (on-chain or off-chain) price going back to 2019.
Every Oracle network should provide this as standard. Why should a user trust the data that an Oracle reports when there is no way of verifying it? This question carries much weight when considering the data permissionlessly instructs direct actions on billions of dollars of value.
With the development of our on-chain dashboard, The Chronicle, we created a new level of expectation for Oracle users and proved to the industry that this can, and more importantly, should, be done.
I sat down with our lead frontend engineer at Chronicle Labs, Brian Belhumeur, to open the book on the challenges he’s faced building it, and more:
Can you tell us a little bit about you, Brian, what came before this, and what led you to Chronicle Labs to work on this project?
“I’m a full-stack engineer, but I love the front end the most because it’s the confluence of engineering, psychology, and the power to make a real difference in countless people’s lives. I spent a lot of time in web2, including at Craigslist and Loom, before I made the transition into web3 with Chronicle.
I have long been a fan of crypto and web3 in general and was thrilled to finally work on it professionally. I love that we’re working from the ethos and legacy of MakerDAO, and providing a core service to the Defi ecosystem.”
What was the starting point of this project? What was the vision for The Chronicle?
“The starting point for the development of the dashboard was conversations with Nik, where I learned that Chronicle has a secure and solid product with unrivaled benefits, but it’s challenging to show anybody the unrivaled level of transparency that’s built into our Oracles.
I immediately set out to deeply understand the architecture and code and then design a dashboard that would convey the simplicity of our security model based on cryptographic guarantees.
It’s important to me that the concepts that secure our oracles shine through clearly while still providing full transparency to those who want to dig deeper. The vision is for the dashboard to be the point of reference for all of Chronicle’s Oracles while providing external validation of all critical pieces of data.”
Chronicle Protocol archives all the price data going back to 2019. How is this possible? And is this unique?
“All of the individual price messages for our Validators are passed on p2p networks, and so are ephemeral in nature. We actively archive all messages from all Validators, whether they are the ones included in a given Oracle update or not.
Currently, we have over 215 million messages dating back to August 2019, and we continue adding at a rate of several million messages per month. This provides us with an unparalleled level of historical verifiability and transparency unmatched by any other Oracle provider.
We provide the data for every Oracle update, from every validator, with every original source value, offering complete transparency from beginning to end.”
So this is ‘The Chronicle’ v1. What can we expect from v2?
“We have big plans for v2. As we work to offer a broader range of Oracle types, we’ll expand the capabilities of The Chronicle to maintain a high level of transparency and data availability for all the new types.
We also plan on adding features to help hackathon participants onboard our test network Oracles, as well as production users, get signed up quickly and instantly to fulfill our accessibility goals. These are just a few of the exciting features in the works, so stay tuned!”
