Getting Started with Oracles & Chronicle Protocol

GM, GM. Welcome to what's going to be another great episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a weekly 30-minute podcast for founders, hackers, and anyone in between to showcase what they've built or their product. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Bianca Buzea, who's the DevRel at Chronicle Protocol, and you may also know her for her role as founder at DevRel Uni. If you didn't know, Chronicle Protocol, dubbed the original oracle on Ethereum, is a novel blockchain agnostic oracle solution. If you stick around for today's episode, you'll see Bianca give an overview of Chronicle Protocol and oracles in general, along with the key criteria to consider when you're selecting your next oracle. All right, let's get into it. GM, GM. Welcome to the show, Bianca. Ecstatic to have you on.

GM, Narb. Thank you so much for the invite.

My pleasure, my pleasure. And yeah, I guess before we get into all the great stuff you have planned for us, did you want to give a brief introduction about yourself if folks aren't familiar?

Sure, would love to. So hi everyone. My name is Bianca. Currently, I'm doing developer relations at Chronicle. At Chronicle, we do decentralized verifiable oracles. As you mentioned earlier, a fun fact, an interesting fact if you want, Chronicle is the first oracle on Ethereum. It's been around since 2017 as part of MakerDAO. Last year in 2023, it spun out of MakerDAO and now it's open for the whole Web3 ecosystem.

Awesome. And I guess how did you find yourself at Chronicle Labs? Were you in Web2 before you came into Web3 or...?

Yeah, that's a great question. So I studied computer science after uni. I've been working as a solutions architect in the Web2 space. Then, I think it was in 2022 after my first ETHDenver, I decided I wanted to go full-time into Web3 because I've been following, if you want, the Web3 space since 2017. So back in 2022 after Denver, I was like, okay, I want to go full-time in Web3. And since then, I've been doing developer relations at a few protocols in the space. And yeah, the most recent one right now, I'm doing at Chronicle.

Awesome. And you're obviously very good at DevRel, so much so that you started your own online uni course, did you not? DevRel Uni?

Yeah, that started actually with a pain point, if you want. I noticed that there are a lot of resources for people who want to become a developer. There are courses, there are boot camps, there is really a lot of material. But for people who want to embrace, if you want, the developer relations career, there isn't much material out there. And I was like, okay, if I'm looking for this sort of resource, probably there are more people out there looking for the same thing. I was lucky to have, and I'm still lucky to have, people in the space very talented doing developer relations. So I reached out to them and yeah, we started this initiative. And so far, we've had six cohorts, very successful, and yeah, it's really something I'm passionate about.

Yeah, and it's become a very valuable asset in the space. I know a lot of Developer DAO folks are either the instructors or come through as students. So keep doing what you're doing. And I guess just before we get into the content you have prepared for us, what would you say is the most valuable asset or skill set to have when wanting to get into the field of developer relations?

Probably, if I were to pick one, I would say empathy. That's the most important because you really need empathy to see the struggles of developers and to really put yourself in their shoes. With other skills, I would say it's a lot easier to learn something new or to progress in a given direction, but if you don't have empathy, it's really, really hard to have this role.

Yeah, well said. And I guess this is a great segue. If you'd like to bring up the content you have prepared for us, I'd like to hear what you got. And folks, while you're watching live, please feel free to post any questions you may have for Bianca in the comments, and we'll bring them up as we go along.

Okay, I think this should come up now. Yeah, perfect. So for today, I want to give an overview on oracles and on Chronicle Protocol. We already talked about myself and my background, so I'm going to skip this one. Briefly in terms of the agenda, we're going to have a brief Oracles 101, then why Chronicle, what sets Chronicle apart, and then I'm going to show how you can start building with Chronicle and use our oracles. So what are Web3 oracles? The way I like to explain oracles is by using this simple real-world analogy, if you want.

If you're thinking about your mobile phone, your mobile phone is powerful because it allows you to interact with a variety of applications. However, in order to have this interaction with all these applications, there is an exchange, a continuous exchange of information. Nevertheless, if you think when you board on a plane and you put your phone on plane mode, all of a sudden your phone becomes pretty much useless because this exchange of information doesn't happen anymore. And there isn't really much you can do with your phone.

Similar to that, if you think about the blockchain, you can imagine it as a big sandbox, and beyond this sandbox, it doesn't know anything about the outside world. However, in order to have meaningful applications, you need data, you need to have knowledge of this outside world beyond the blockchain. So here is where oracles come into play. Basically, they are the middleware, if you want, to connect the blockchain with the outside world so the smart contracts can read data from that and you can power your decentralized application.

So this was a brief overview of oracles to kind of, I'm sure most of the people already know what are oracles, but I like giving it just in case there are any people new out there curious about the Web3 space. In terms of Chronicle, as I mentioned at the beginning, it's been around since 2017, used to be part of MakerDAO. Back in 2023 last year, it spun out of MakerDAO and now everyone can use the same oracles, it's open, the protocol, to the whole Web3 ecosystem.

In terms of TVS, or total value secured, this is quite an important metric when we're talking about oracles, I would say the most important metric. It secures around 10 billion of assets. And here you can see a capture I took from DeFi Llama. As you can see, it's the second largest oracle in terms of TVS.

Now what sets Chronicle apart, and what's like the secret sauce if you want, are our Scribe oracles. Scribe oracles are extremely gas efficient and they use aggregated Schnorr signatures. Schnorr signatures have been around for a while, I think since the 1991. However, this is the first time when Schnorr signatures are used in the context of Web3 oracles. And by using these Schnorr signatures, something very interesting happens. This aggregation scheme basically allows over 60% gas reduction on L1 and over 68% on L2. And we're going to see a bit further why this is very important beyond the gas saving itself, what it means further.

In terms of Scribe, we're going to look at Schnorr signatures, optimistic updates, and the challenge bounties. And I'm going to take them one by one. We're starting with Chronicle Scribe. I want to make here the difference between Scribe used on Layer 2 networks and also we're going to talk a bit next about Scribe Optimistic which is used on Layer 1 networks such as Ethereum mainnet. So Scribe is used on Layer 2 networks and let's look first before looking into Scribe what's kind of the status quo if you want in terms of signatures and oracles in the industry. The status quo is based on ECDSA signatures or Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm. However, kind of the downside if you want of this is that there is a one-to-one relationship between the signature and the number of signers, which means that more signers results in more signatures and this can become very expensive.

Now with Scribe that uses a novel application of Schnorr signature cryptography, it uses basically an aggregation algorithm that creates a super signature, a big signature, which is then authenticated via ECDSA. This was on Layer 2, now on Layer 1. On Layer 1, as we know, computation is expensive, especially when the network is congested, it can become very prohibitively expensive. And signature aggregation itself is a gas intensive process. So what does Scribe Optimistic, it introduces an opPoke. This is an additional function that basically enables off-chain verification of the Schnorr aggregation signatures. Now anyone can verify and call this signature and say like, hey, this data is not right.

So what is happening is that similar to optimistic chains out there, optimistic Layer 2s, we have values that are optimistically proposed by validators and they are put into a buffer. And during this buffer time, anyone can basically contest the response and even get rewarded if they find like a full response they can get a reward in ETH. So you can see here in the diagram basically we have different data sources, then we have the validators who are looking at these data sources. Each of them they using first ECDSA, then it forms the big aggregated Schnorr signature and one of the validators then put with their signatures this on-chain onto the Scribe Optimistic smart contract. If during the buffer time there is no successful challenge, means that the data is finalized successfully. But if there is a challenge, the challenger gets the reward, the validator gets removed and obviously the data also gets removed. This is to ensure the security of the system.

Now in terms of properties, we have three properties that I would like to look at. The first one is decentralization, verifiability, and scalability.

So in terms of decentralization, we have a network of decentralized validators. As you can see, there are protocols that people already use, protocols with very good reputation, such as MakerDAO, Gitcoin, Infura, ETHGlobal and many others. And the main idea is that basically these validators are putting their reputation at stake. So they are incentivized because of what they do to be correct.

Now the next property is verifiability. So with Chronicle, we have end-to-end verifiable data on-chain. And I want to show you what we mean by that. So if we go to the Chronicle dashboard, we can open the dashboard here. You can see here the oracles. Let's say we want to look at the ETH/USD oracle. We can scroll and see the different validators. These are all the validators that contributed to this price. Let's say we pick one of the validators, I'm going to pick the Etherscan one, and I can see all the different data sources that have been used by this validator. As you can see, it's a combination of off-chain data sources such as CEXs and on-chain data sources such as DEXs. So it's this combination, and we can also go ahead and even verify the signature of this validator. Here you can verify in the browser basically the accuracy of the signature. And what we want to really emphasize here is that even the slightest modification will invalidate the signature. So if for example I delete one of the zeros, of course this won't match anymore and the signature is considered invalid. Same principle here, we have the Schnorr signature and here basically is the data that actually gets put on-chain. So first we call it a median of medians. Each validator does a median from all the data sources, and then from all the validators' values, basically we do the median again, and that's the value that gets put on-chain.

This was the verifiability part. Next we have scalability. I was mentioning at the beginning that with Schnorr signatures and Scribes, we're able to achieve over 60% gas costs on Layer 1 and over 68 on Layer 2. And this is very powerful for two reasons. The most obvious one is it minimizes the gas cost for the oracles, which means like a cheaper bill and yeah, this one is it's quite obvious. But personally, I find more interesting the second benefit. And this one is I would say it's not directly it's not that easy to grasp from the beginning. Basically it decouples the oracle update gas cost from the number of validators. And you can see in this table here for five signatures, we have 66,461, and then for 100 signatures, we have 68,845. The difference between five signatures and 100 signatures is basically around 2000 in gas, so we can consider it constant basically. So what this means is that right now we can decouple the number of validators, we can increase and add as many validators as we want, and this won't affect the cost. This is very powerful, I would say, because as we know, the more signatures out there the more validators and the more signatures means a more resilient oracle and also a more decentralized oracle, so a better alignment with the ethos of Web3.

Now Chronicle is blockchain agnostic. Right now I think it's live on 11 chains. The most recent ones are Superseed and Corn. I just see that I haven't included the logos, I'm going to update the logos. But yeah, this list is constantly evolving and additional chains are getting integrated as we go.

And now a bit about how can someone read and use Chronicle oracles. The first step is to get access. And I'm saying this because Chronicle oracles are read-protected by a whitelist, so you need to be whitelisted in order to read from a Chronicle oracle. But the good news is that on testnet you can whitelist yourself. We have a contract that is called self-kisser, and you can self-kiss yourself and enable your address to read from the oracle. If you scan this QR code, it's going to take you to a tutorial that explains you step-by-step how to read from the oracle. We're going to walk through it a bit later, but first I want to finish about the process.

So when it comes to reading from an oracle, you basically select the chain that you want to use. Back to our dashboard here, you can see that there are different chains, all these are different chains. So first you select the chain that you want to use, then you get the address of the oracle that you want to use. So again let's say I don't know, again the ETH/USD, here I copy the address. Then we get the address of the self-kisser. You can find that either in the docs or it's also in this tutorial here. And then you do the whitelisting, basically you authorize the address to read from the oracle. Another good resource I wanted to mention is the scaffold-oracle-reader. I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with Scaffold ETH from Austin Griffith and BuidlGuidl, it's really a great resource to get yourself up to speed and to focus on the parts that differentiate your app. So we build on top of that an oracle reader to enable our developers to start building faster.

And finally, here our socials. So if you want to get in contact on X, it's @ChronicleLabs. But I think probably the most important resource is the documentation portal that you can find in the QR code. Now how are we doing with time? Are we okay for a short demo?

Oh yeah, you got time.

Beautiful. Excuse me, I have a bit of a cold. No, you're good, you're good. So here I have on Remix an oracle reader. This is basically the QR code that I was mentioning here. And you can also find it in the docs when you go to tutorials, consuming oracle data. Here is this little tutorial here. But I want to walk you through to see basically what to expect. So first it has very good comments I would say, so if you have the patience to read through the comments I think it's pretty self-explanatory. But since we're here I'm going to walk you through it. So we have our contract OracleReader. Then we have a variable chronicle of type IChronicle interface and we point it to this address. As you can see in the comments here, this is the address for the ETH/USD oracle on Sepolia network. Then we're going to need the address of the self-kisser, we do the same procedure, we create a variable selfKisser of type ISelfKisser and then we point it to this address which corresponds to the self-kisser on Sepolia. It's very important to pay attention of the self-kisser's address because it doesn't have the same address in all the networks so you need to make sure that you grab the right address for that network. Then in the constructor, we do the whitelisting part where we enable our address to read from the oracle. And we have a read function that returns the value and the age. The age basically tells us how long ago since the last read. It's a Unix timestamp that indicates the last update basically. And then here I just copied from the IChronicle interface the read function and readWithAge and from the ISelfKisser interface the selfKiss function for the whitelisting. So yeah, if we go and compile our OracleReader and deploy it, we're going to select injected Web3.

And hopefully, yes, I'm going to remember my password.

Now I'm selecting the contract and we're deploying. I'm going to get an instance of the contract and we can get the price of ETH/USD I think, yes, we have ETH/USD here.

So let's see. Okay we have our read function here. So this is the value and then the age. As you can see the value looks like a very big number and that's because Chronicle oracles use 18 decimal places. So really the value you're looking at is 3413, if you count the decimals, and the age, this is Unix timestamp of the last update. And then we also have the self-kisser and the chronicle which is the address of the ETH/USD. So very, very simple I would say.

Do we have any questions so far? Gang, if you have any questions for Bianca, this is the time to post them in. One clarification question from me is what does KISS stand for and why was that chosen as the term here?

Yeah, this is like from the back in the days with MakerDAO. I wasn't with the team, I joined Chronicle this year. But I know a lot of the terms are from the MakerDAO vocabulary, including KISS. KISS, there is also DISS basically. DISS is the opposite of KISS. So KISS is to get access to an oracle and DISS is when your access gets removed. Nice, nice. Nothing wrong with having a little fun with it. Yeah, developers should have fun as well. Exactly, exactly.

Yeah, in terms of, I know that your content today basically went over this but if you were to summarize, like what would differentiate Chronicle from other oracles? Why would people choose Chronicle over them?

I would probably summarize it back to the three characteristics, the decentralization, verifiability, and scalability. So on the decentralized part, we saw that basically the validators are well-known protocols from the space and they're run by this network of validators in a decentralized fashion, which doesn't, I think it's the single oracle that actually showcases like okay, these are our validators and you can actually look on the dashboard and see them. Which brings us to the verifiability part that I demoed, you can go on the dashboard and see basically end-to-end from the data source up to how this data gets aggregated and pushed on-chain. And then the last part, the scalability, we saw how using Schnorr signatures we can aggregate the data and basically achieve a lot of gas costs which is important one in terms of cheaper oracles but also in terms of better security and better decentralization, which I think are very important.

Excellent answer, excellent answer. And obviously, there is a lot of great functionality that Chronicle Protocol has here. Is there anything in particular that you and the team are really proud of that you pushed out in 2024?

Hard to choose one. There are a lot of updates, there's been a lot of integrations at the chain level with a lot of chains and also the protocol levels with different protocols. But probably if I were to pick only one, I would say the launch of our Verified Asset Oracle, previously known as the Real World Asset Oracle. And I think this is especially interesting given the current industry trend, if you want, and the direction for RWAs which bring a lot of new use cases but also a lot of liquidity on-chain. So we had this launch this year with M0 for their crypto dollar and additional integrations follow with Animoney for Centrifuge, with Superstate and then joining the TAC, the Tokenization Asset Coalition. I think these are probably the milestones that, or at least in my case, I'm the proudest.

Excellent, excellent. Yeah, that's awesome to hear. And I guess as we're approaching year's end, is there any alpha or anything you can share about the roadmap for 2025?

Not something specifically I'm allowed to say right now, but I would say definitely there is a lot more to come in terms of RWAs, real-world assets, and yeah, some exciting integrations.

Right on, right on. We're all looking forward to that. And I guess to conclude, just to maybe if you want to bring up that slide your final slide once again, like what's the how can people get in touch what's the best way for people to get started with Chronicle Labs today?

Probably the best way I would say is to go to our documentation portal, docs.chroniclelabs.org. There you can find the different information whether you're a developer or just someone interested about our oracles. We have different learning journeys, so you can basically find the right path, if you want, for you. And then in terms of updates and what's coming up, what are the news, I think the best way is to keep an eye on our Twitter, which is @ChronicleLabs. Hear hear. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And folks all that information will also be in the description of the YouTube video below, so definitely check them out or check out Chronicle Labs and hit up that documentation. And with that, I just want to thank you again Bianca for coming on the show. Really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to give us this wonderful overview. And I'm sure a lot of folks are going to be dabbling with Chronicle Labs over the weekend.

Thank you so much, Narb. Thank you for having me, and I wish you a great 2025 again and looking forward to see the show over 2025.

Thank you so much. Wishing you the same, and as well to all our viewers, and we will catch you all in the new year. Right on. Happy New Year.

Bye! Happy New Year! Bye.