Chronicle Labs - Oracles, Raising the Standard

hi my name is uh Nicholas kungl I'm the founder of Chronicle and Chronicle is an oracle protocol that spun out of maker Dow um about two years ago and uh so I want to kind of give you an introduction and kind of show you like how we're kind of changing the game uh when it comes to oracles so um yeah origin story right uh slightly touched on this earlier but uh essentially uh was part of the the OG team of of maker and uh when we were developing Dy uh there were no oracles so uh we had to make our own and so in conjunction with the launch of Sai which was like the prototype to to die uh in in June of 2017 uh we launched kind of the maker oracles and so that today uh has continued into what has evolved into chronical protocol and so um you know we were securing maker Dow since day one and we're still securing them today and so that makes us one of like the longest continuous running right most battle tested protocols in in all of crypto right going on seven years and billions and billions of dollars secured um so uh I want to kind of talk about um kind of the the three kind of main areas that I think like we are kind of setting the standard for for chronicle and those are decentralization uh verifiability and and scalability and so I'll kind of go over all of these uh for for uh for about a couple minutes each so first is um glitchy um is kind of decentralization and so um there are a lot of different Oracle protocols right and they all work slightly differently but in general they all have a validator network and so um the like 30 second up down like review of any Oracle you can do is just look at like okay does it have validators and who are the validators right and what is what are the consensus kind of requirements and so what we've done with Chronicle is that we have decided to use a validator network that is built by um our community right and so what we say is that right as an oracle protocol right um uh maybe users don't trust us but uh they should trust the oh we have a little box up there okay what no that's not uh okay what's what's happening here okay yeah I I don't know okay cool so um right uh as a user of Chronicle oracles right you don't have to trust Chronicle is the point right uh you can say oh well maybe you hold some die right and so you trust maker or maybe you have a nosis safe and so you trust nosis or maybe you've participated in gitcoin grants and so you trust gitcoin right and we're we're not asking you to trust right any of these validators individually but as a group right um we're trying to build this like consensus of almost like the community right to have like a truly like Community powered Oracle and so I'm happy to announce that um this week uh we're on boarding four new validators uh including eth global uh mantle bankless and Oiler and so we're really excited to kind of have them join the the chronical validator Network and uh we'll be you know onboarding more and more validators you know probably on a monthly basis uh going forward right and the goal is just that um we just get a validator network of only the highest quality right most trusted people in crypto such that uh to uh can kind of manipulate the Oracle would be T to amount to crypto doing cannibalism on itself so and so here you can kind of see right a list of a bunch of the validators right their keys they're reporting like different data um the the second factor I want to talk about is verifiability and so this is something that I think is very unique uh to Chronicle and so uh what we essentially allow you to do is Trace where all of this data comes from right so right now with oracles they're essentially like a black box right it's like this fortune teller smart contract it gives you the data and you kind of just say okay I trust this contract but you don't really have any context for where does this data come from how was this magical you know number calculated right and so with Chronicle we really allow you to dig like one level deeper right so you don't just see this top level of there's the Oracle and that's you know the data that it's reporting right uh we show you like the individual validators right uh what they reported um each of the these data reports right is signed so they've each generated a signature and uh you can actually verify that that data yourself now if you expand each of these validator queries uh you can even see like like the exact data that they used right and where they got that data from and what the snapshot was right I think now we even show the the time stamps um so it's not just oh Argent said you know this is the price it's Argent said this is the price because binance said this and coinbase said this and and Unis swap said this and you can verify all of this data in your browser right and so all of this data has been signed and uh give that you know the key of the validator right you can prove to yourself that none of this data was tampered with because as soon as you change you know anything in the data right like if you were to change the uh the Tim stamp you know from uh by by 2 seconds now the the message won't verify anymore right and this is the same kind of verification that the smart contract does on chain right but now you're just able to do it yourself as a user in the browser anyway right to prove to yourself that not just for the current data but all of the historical data in the past right uh that uh this Oracle has uh is uh is genuine and so the last bit that I want to talk about is scalability and I think this is kind of not talked about uh enough in crypto so the the problem that you have with a lot of oracles is that from a gas perspective they're quite expensive and so when gas prices go up or when the price of eth goes up or both because there tends to be a good correlation between the two um what you find is that you know oracle prices uh multiply very very quickly and to to put into perspective like how bad this can become in 2021 maker spent around $6.5 million dollar just on gas for uh for updating the oracles right so it it's a very significant problem and so if you can reduce the gas cost per Oracle update I mean you stand to benefit a lot right uh you can either Express this as um this Oracle service is now cheaper right and there for more accessible to to more people right uh you could express it at another way that could be expressed as you can update this Oracle more often right so for the same amount of uh money right you can update the or orle you know three times as much or four times as much and that is just a more performant Oracle right it's a more accurate Oracle right uh the uh right the the accuracy of an oracle is not determined by like anything like latency or like how quickly right this happens or that happens no the the bottleneck is really cost right so if you're willing to you know stomach losing a lot of money right you can have an oracle that updates like every block right but oracles don't do that and the reason is because they're cost constraint and so what we've managed to do actually is um we came up with a new mechanism which we call kind of optimistic schnore and essentially um I I'll kind of gloss over this uh a little bit um but essentially what we do is rather than having this onetoone relationship of like validators to signatures which basically just means you end up having as your validator list grows you just end up having like a huge huge huge amount of like call data um you essentially are able to compress everything into a single signature so uh schnor signatures are what we call like an aggregated signature uh so they're similar to something like BLS signatures in in that respect uh but they're significantly cheaper to verify on chain than um than BLS signatures are um and so that stands to benefit you know both on l2s and on layer ones because on layer twos uh cost tends to be determined by the amount of data uh so in this case you're pushing less data through an update done in this way um and versus on L1 right you want cheaper compute and uh you know sh signatures are cheaper to compute than than BLS so just to put into prepare uh into like a comparison of like what the difference is here um a chain link validator update with like 11 or oracles sorry 11 validators is around 300,000 gas more or less right um with pith and Redstone it's around 180,000 140,000 respectively uh with Chronicle we've got this down to 66,000 gas um you know to to compare this another way um the default ethereum like transaction gas amount right just to send eth from like one person to another is 21,000 gas right so uh an oracle update here has been basically compressed to the amount of like three eth transfers which is is very cheap but I think the the thing to highlight here is not just the absolute gas amount but also to point out that we can do this with uh much more validators than than others can so when you look at something like chain link or pith or Redstone they have this linear relationship of the cost to update the Oracle and the number of validators that they use um with Chronicle because we use this aggregated signature approach and because signatures cost the same amount no matter how many valid to verify no matter how many validators have signed them right we can uh essentially have the same fixed gas cost for any number of validators and so the the more validators that we use right the much stronger consensus uh guarantees you you can kind of have so uh that's it for me to today um but I want to thank you all for coming um if what I said sounds interesting to you uh you can follow us on Twitter at Chronicle Labs uh or check out our website Chronicle labs. org uh that uh those awesome screenshots I showed you earlier from all the validators and the verification that's on our dashboard which you can also reach from Chronicle labs. org um and if you have any questions for me um I don't think we have time right now but uh come find me afterwards I'd love to talk to you thank you