The highly anticipated arrival of the Plume Network mainnet will include full integration with Chronicle Protocol, ensuring Plume builders have access to 92+ secure, verifiable, and cost-efficient data feeds for a variety of crypto native, ‘real world’ assets, and yield rates from day one.
Leaders in ‘RWA’ infrastructure, Plume has developed a public layer-1 blockchain designed to scale tokenized assets. Chronicle’s Oracle infrastructure will unlock access to the realtime and historical data required to develop DeFi and RWAfi applications.
Plume builders can leverage the same decentralized Oracle network that continues to power Sky (FKA MakerDAO), Spark, Morpho, Superstate, and Centrifuge, and has been live since 2017; delivering a data pipeline that is unmatched in security and resilience. This includes Verified Asset, our leading Oracle solution for tokenizing assets that originate offchain.
There are three words that we live by at Chronicle, ‘don’t trust, verify’, and we believe you should do the same when it comes to the data an Oracle supplies. End-to-end verifiability and transparency are unique and leading features of Scribe, Chronicle’s novel Oracle architecture. This means no more black-box Oracles. Users and builders of Chronicle are empowered with the complete picture, including where the original data was sourced, which nodes reported and signed it, and how the final value was determined.
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 and how Scribe stacks up:
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 Schnorr 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.
Oracle networks constructed in this way must keep validator or signer numbers low to maintain a lower operating cost, 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 the 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, more than one Oracle provider runs all or the majority of its protocol’s nodes themselves, securing millions of dollars of TVL. Nothing stops them from draining your project if they get compromised. This is the risk of using a centralized Oracle.
At Chronicle, all of our validators are distributed and 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 Schnorr signatures - to read more about that, check out this research report by Token Terminal.
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 Oracle networks. 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.
