Key Takeaways
- As ETH and gas rise in the bull cycle, Chronicle keeps oracle costs low, ensuring decentralization, reliable data, and better UX across L1s and L2s.
- Chronicle eliminates the traditional oracle cost–security tradeoff by compressing validator signatures with Scribe and enabling gas-efficient updates via ScribeOptimistic.
- With Chronicle, builders can keep oracle costs low on both L1 and L2 without sacrificing security, even as the validator set grows.
When ETH price climbs, gas prices follow—and with them, the cost of onchain infrastructure.In previous bull cycles, we saw simple ETH transfers spike over $35. Builders were priced out, users dropped off, and high-friction UX became the norm.
Protocol upgrades like EIP-1559 and Dencun have helped. Layer 2s (L2s) now absorb much of the activity, relieving pressure on Ethereum mainnet. But core infra—especially oracles—remains tightly coupled to gas.
When it costs more to publish data, every oracle update becomes a decision between security and affordability.
Chronicle’s Solution: Scalable, Secure, Gas-Efficient Oracles
Historically, oracles faced a hard tradeoff:
Bigger validator set → stronger decentralization, higher gas
Smaller validator set → cheaper updates, weaker guarantees
Chronicle broke that tradeoff.
At the heart of our solution is Scribe, a novel oracle system using Schnorr signature aggregation (via MuSig2). It compresses multiple validator signatures into a single super-signature—reducing gas usage by 60% on L1 and over 68% on L2.
ScribeOptimistic: Scaling L1 Oracles Without Scaling Costs
ScribeOptimistic builds on Scribe with an optimistic update model—perfectly suited for high-cost environments like Ethereum mainnet.
With ScribeOptimistic all values optimistically proposed by the Oracle network validators are put into a public “buffer” and get automatically accepted after the challenge period has concluded. During the challenge period:
- Offchain Verification: anyone can verify the signature offchain
- OpChallenge(): if a challenger finds an invalid signature, the challenger can call opChallenge() to trigger an onchain verification
- Rewards and Accountability: successful challengers receive an ETH reward, the optimistic value is discarded, and the validator responsible for the invalid value is removed. This automatic kick ensures a validator has exactly one chance to push invalid data. They cannot exploit challenger wallets by repeatedly submitting invalid opPokes.
This architecture means Chronicle can scale the number of validators without inflating gas costs.
Why This Matters Now
Gas might feel manageable now, but ETH is rising, and bull market activity will follow. Protocols that don’t optimize early will feel the squeeze — not just in fees, but in UX, and overall decentralization risk.
By using Schnorr signatures and offchain-verified optimistic updates, we’ve made it possible to keep oracle costs low on both L1s and L2s—even as validator sets grow. That means:
- You no longer have to sacrifice decentralization and security to reduce costs.
- You can stay on Ethereum L1 without overpaying.
- You get cost-efficient infrastructure without security tradeoffs—no matter how the markets move.
