In recent years, Real-World Assets (RWAs) have experienced rapid and transformative growth. By tokenizing traditionally illiquid assets, such as real estate, fine art, government bonds, and equities, RWAs are closing the gap between conventional finance and the emerging world of decentralized finance (DeFi). This integration not only enhances liquidity, transparency, and accessibility but also unlocks new avenues for financial innovation. A joint report by the Boston Consulting Group and ADDX predicted that the market for tokenized illiquid assets could reach $16 trillion by 2030.

Oracles play a crucial role in tokenizing off-chain assets. They source external data and deliver it on-chain. This enables smart contracts to operate transparently and autonomously. At the end of March, Chronicle—an oracle network spun out of the MakerDAO (now Sky) ecosystem—closed a $12 million seed round. With over $10.2 billion in Total Value Secured (TVS), Chronicle now stands as the second-largest oracle provider in the industry, drawing market attention once again.

This article dives into Chronicle’s development journey, covering its team, technical architecture, ecosystem growth, and roadmap, and sheds light on its long-term potential.

What is Chronicle?

With a strong focus on DeFi and Real-World Assets (RWA), Chronicle is a decentralized oracle infrastructure designed to deliver seamless, verifiable data transmission across blockchains.

Source: @ChronicleLabs

Chronicle was the first oracle launched on Ethereum and now supports a growing list of ecosystems, including Arbitrum, Mantle, Scroll, and Berachain. As of April 8, Chronicle reports over $10.2 billion in TVS and operates 1,296 oracles. Based on TVS alone, Chronicle holds a 17% market share, ranking second among Oracle providers. It has partnered with famous protocols like MakerDAO, Spark, and Morpho.

Source: defillama.com

Chronicle pioneered the Scribe architecture, a new Oracle framework that uses Schnorr signature aggregation to reduce on-chain data costs dramatically. By decoupling the number of validators from gas fees, Scribe lowers L1 Oracle gas costs by over 60% and L2 costs by more than 68%.

Chronicle has not yet launched a token, but users can currently earn Chronicle Points through participating in SKY ecosystem activities. These Points are expected to be redeemable for Chronicle tokens at a later date.

Team Background & Funding

Chronicle isn’t a newcomer to the Oracle landscape; it is a seasoned project that was launched in 2017. Initially, it was the Oracle module for MakerDAO and was exclusively used within the MakerDAO ecosystem to support SAI, the precursor to DAI.

In 2022, MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen proposed the “Endgame” plan—a vision to evolve MakerDAO through modular architecture, decentralized governance, and RWA (Real World Assets) integration. This strategic shift set the stage for Chronicle to spin off. By 2023, Chronicle Labs was formally established, and Chronicle became an independent entity, expanding its data services beyond MakerDAO. To date, it has processed over $22 billion in total value secured (TVS).

Born from the MakerDAO ecosystem, Chronicle’s core team largely hails from the same roots. Founder Niklas Kunkel was one of the original core contributors to MakerDAO and previously led backend and oracle development. He spearheaded projects like OasisDEX and DSProxy. Growth lead Jen Senhaji also served in a business development role at MakerDAO.

On March 25, Chronicle closed a $12 million seed round led by Strobe Ventures (formerly BlockTower Capital). Other notable backers included Galaxy Vision Hill, Brevan Howard Digital, Tioga Capital, and Fenbushi Capital. Prominent angel investors, including Rune Christensen (Sky/MakerDAO), Andre Cronje (Sonic, Yearn), Stani Kulechov (Aave), and Mark Phillips (Steakhouse), also participated.

Chronicle states that the new funding will accelerate product development, deepen strategic partnerships, and strengthen compliance efforts, reinforcing its position as a critical bridge between traditional finance and digital assets.

Architecture & Core Features

Chronicle aims to provide real-time data validation for tokenized financial products and is actively building infrastructure tailored for institutional-scale adoption. To create a low-cost, secure, scalable, and decentralized network, Chronicle emphasizes the following core features:

1) Validator Network: Fully Community-Driven

Chronicle currently operates with 25 validator nodes, including well-established players such as Infura, Etherscan, Gnosis, Gitcoin, Mantle, and MakerDAO. This structure, powered by reputable, industry-leading contributors, builds community trust while eliminating single points of failure, which enhances the network’s security and transparency. Additionally, the system empowers any user to act as a watchdog by submitting fraud proofs, which can automatically deactivate malicious validators.

Source: chroniclelabs.org

2) Scribe: A Next-Generation Oracle Architecture Built on Schnorr Multisig

Unlike conventional Oracle frameworks, Chronicle’s Scribe introduces two key innovations:

• Striking a balance between security, decentralization, and cost-efficiency

Before Scribe, blockchain oracles relied on ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm), where each validator individually signed messages, resulting in a one-to-one relationship. While this ensured security and decentralization, it also meant that increasing the number of validators significantly raised the cost of synchronizing and updating data on-chain.

To overcome this limitation, Chronicle built a novel architecture that decouples the number of validators from on-chain gas costs. Scribe enables large validator sets while keeping data update and on-chain costs low. Specifically, Scribe uses Schnorr cryptography to aggregate signatures and keys into a single “super signature,” which is then authenticated using ECDSA.

This many-to-one signature scheme compresses data at scale. It minimises what needs to be transmitted to the Oracle smart contract. As a result, gas costs for updates remain nearly constant, regardless of validator count. According to a Messari report, in Q4 of last year, Chronicle’s average gas cost per update was $4.80, compared to Chainlink’s $12.27—a 60.9% cost reduction.

• Verifiable Data Integrity

Chronicle provides users with core tooling to enable verifiability at every level. Anyone can track data end-to-end and cryptographically verify individual validator signatures and the Schnorr-based signatures that push prices on-chain.

Source: chroniclelabs.org

3) Plug-and-Play Developer Experience

Chronicle’s architecture is designed with developers in mind. It offers a single, unified interface for seamless cross-chain integration, which enables deployment in just minutes. Currently, Chronicle supports 14 blockchain networks, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Mantle, zkSync, and Base.

Core Products

Chronicle focuses on providing data infrastructure for the DeFi and RWA sectors. For DeFi protocols, Chronicle supplies key data types including crypto asset prices, fiat exchange rates, and staking yields. It adopts a push model to deliver real-time price updates on a per-minute or per-hour basis, or whenever price fluctuations exceed a predefined threshold.

In the RWA (Real-World Assets) domain, Chronicle has developed an exclusive Oracle product called Verified Asset. Built on the Chronicle protocol, this Oracle securely and transparently verifies the integrity and quality of off-chain assets, such as real estate, artwork, gold, as well as financial instruments like government bonds and stocks, transmits the resulting data on-chain, and delivers it directly to smart contracts and blockchain-based applications. Verified Asset currently supports key partners including M^0, the tokenization platform Centrifuge, and the on-chain investment protocol Superstate.

Source: chroniclelabs.org/blog

Take M^0 as an example. This is a decentralized infrastructure that enables institutions to issue stablecoins and other crypto-native assets. Through this collaboration, Chronicle verifies the existence and valuation of the issuer’s collateral (such as short-term U.S. Treasury bills). Once the verification is complete, Chronicle generates a verifiable digital signature that determines the exact amount of tokens the issuer can mint.

Ecosystem Development & Incentives

To grow its ecosystem, Chronicle has launched multiple incentive initiatives, including a community ambassador program, bug bounty program, and hackathons. Together, these initiatives provide participants with comprehensive support—financial, technical, and operational.

In mid-September last year, Chronicle partnered with SKY to launch a Points program aimed at boosting community engagement. Users can stake USDS (a SKY protocol stablecoin, viewed as an upgraded version of DAI) across three platforms—Sky.Money, Spark, and Summer Fi—to earn Chronicle Points, which will later be redeemable at a ratio of 10 Points = 1 CLE token. The total supply of CLE tokens is capped at 10 billion, with 3.75 billion Chronicle Points issued annually.

As of March 10, Sky.Money alone shows over $21.5 million in staked USDS value, with more than 2.098 billion Points accumulated.

Source: info.sky.money

These collaborative efforts highlight the close relationship between Chronicle and SKY. This strategic alignment provides Chronicle with SKY’s deep DeFi expertise, operational experience, and ecosystem resources. It offers significant momentum for its long-term growth.

Beyond this, Chronicle continues to expand its network and has formed strong partnerships with notable industry players, including BadgerDAO, Lido, Circle, Dolomite, Euler, Coinbase, and Gnosis Pay.

Roadmap & Potential Challenges

Chronicle has not released a detailed roadmap, but statements from team members indicate that product development is a top priority for this year, with a wide range of new features expected to launch soon. In its recent funding announcement, the team also emphasized the expansion of partnerships and the enhancement of compliance measures.

That said, to maintain a leading position in the Oracle space, Chronicle must navigate several key challenges:

• While Chronicle currently operates a network of 25 validators chosen based on reputation (including Infura, Etherscan, Gnosis, and others) and employs a fraud-proof mechanism to enhance decentralisation, the team has not publicly disclosed the selection criteria or incentive structure. Governance processes also lack concrete plans, which may raise concerns around decentralization and transparency.
• As a critical bridge between digital and real-world value, Oracles are frequent targets of attacks such as flash loan exploits. Chronicle will need to continuously evolve its multi-layered security strategy to safeguard its data sources, validation logic, and signing infrastructure.
• Given its handling of sensitive financial data, Chronicle must prioritize privacy protection. While the platform has integrated zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technologies to preserve user anonymity without sacrificing verifiability, the scope of supported data types and validation logic remains limited and requires further innovation.
• The large-scale tokenization of RWAs introduces substantial legal and regulatory complexity, including securities laws and financial oversight, which place greater compliance demands on Chronicle. Despite growing interest from regulators such as the SEC in exploring compliant tokenized asset frameworks, specific legal standards remain unsettled. Therefore, Chronicle must remain agile and responsive to evolving requirements, including audit standards, update frequencies, and data disclosure practices.

Conclusion

Chronicle emerged from the SKY ecosystem, leveraging its deep-rooted synergies to establish a distinct foothold in the Oracle landscape. Its novel Scribe architecture, decoupling the number of validators from gas costs, has unlocked greater decentralization, scalability, and operational efficiency.

While Chronicle has reached key milestones, with TVS now exceeding $10 billion, it still faces formidable challenges around technology development, validator governance, community incentives, and ecosystem expansion. Continued success will require persistence, strategic focus, and disciplined execution.