Summary
This proposal seeks to enable the utilization of Chronicle Oracles to secure assets on Compound Finance in its current and future instances.
Rationale
Having been developed within MakerDAO, Chronicle is the first Oracle protocol on Ethereum which was launched in June of 2017 in conjunction with the Maker Protocol and the DAI stablecoin. Since then Chronicle has forged a proven track without a single hack / exploit in over 7 years of operation. This means Chronicle isn’t just the longest running incident-free Oracle protocol, but actually one of the longest running incident-free protocols on Ethereum period. Since launch Chronicle has secured up to $22B in TVL for some of the largest DeFi protocols including MakerDAO, Spark, Morpho, and Gnosis. Today Chronicle secures over $11.2B in TVL which is more than every other Oracle protocol save for Chainlink combined.
We believe Chronicle would make an excellent additional Oracle to Compound for the simple reason that Chronicle is the the most secure, decentralized, transparent, and verifiable Oracle. Our ethos is “don’t trust, verify” and we’ve designed every aspect of Chronicle’s architecture around that commitment.
Secure
Given the nature of Oracles as the Achille’s Heel of a DeFi protocol, it can’t be overstated how critical security is both when designing and choosing an Oracle. Only Chronicle has a flawless 7 year track record under its belt with billions in TVL.
Also of note is that Chronicle Oracles have successfully passed 4 audits from Chain Security, Spearbit, ABDK, and Cantina. While audits should never be exclusively relied on to confirm the security of a system, they are a crucial piece of the puzzle and we’re proud to work with some of the most elite auditors in the space.
Furthermore, has designed its entire architecture to minimize single points of failure. Parallelized redundancy systems are present throughout the Chronicle protocol allowing for failures of individual modules without affecting oracle integrity and oracle uptime. One key example is Chronicle’s communication layer. Validators communicate data via three protocols in parallel (libP2P, Secure Scuttlebutt, and TOR) to protect against Denial-of-Service and other vulnerabilities. The key insight here is that compromise of any individual communication protocol won’t affect the health of the overall system. Happy if there is interest from the community to elaborate other areas in Chronicle’s architecture where this system-design pattern is applied.
Decentralization
Chronicle Oracles are powered by a decentralized network of validators composed of heavyweights in the crypto industry with an exemplary reputation of integrity. Every Oracle update requires a supermajority quorum of the decentralized validator network.
Validators for Chronicle include:
Infura
Etherscan
Gnosis
Gitcoin
MyCrypto
dYdX
0x
MakerDAO
DeFi Saver
Nethermind
ETH Global
Mantle
Transparent
Transparency is one of the core values of Chronicle. Chronicle Oracles exhibit end-to-end transparency rather than be blackbox fortune tellers that spit out a number like other Oracles. With Chronicle every bit of information is completely transparent including:
- the data sources used
- the model for analyzing data
- every validator commitment includes a snapshot trace of raw data utilized in model
- every oracle update includes the set of validator commitments
- data archive of validator and oracle commitments going back to 2017
We acknowledge transparency is meaningless without accessibility and legibility. This is why the aforementioned data is easily accessible through our Dashboard and API.
Dashboard
Dashbaord - Oracle
Dashboard - Validator Trace
API
https://chroniclelabs.org/api/pair/CBBTCUSDC/latest?trace=true
https://chroniclelabs.org/api/pair/CBBTCUSDC/messages?limit=100&trace=true
Verifiable
Chronicle Oracles are end-to-end verifiable meaning you don’t just transparently see the data from source to validator to oracle, but rather can prove cryptographically that the data has not been tampered with. Again, accessibility and legibility play a significant role here so we’ve made it easy for anyone to verify both validator and oracle signatures in the dashboard.
Here’s an example using the CBBTC/USDC Oracle to illustrate how simple it is to verify data in Chronicle.
First let’s start by verifying the MakerDAO validator below:
Clicking on Verify pulls up the widget we can use to verify the MakerDAO commitment.
Here we see MakerDAO committed to a CBBTC/USDC price of $65,734.98 at time 1728915789.
Clicking the Verify button checks that the signature matches the claimed data. If you get Chronicle popcorn, success, the validator created a legitimate data commitment to the Oracle.
For the sake of completeness, let’s modify the timestamp by 1 second from 1728915789 to 1728915788. Clicking Verify now shows this signature is invalid and does not match the data. Alternatively one could test this by changing the price or pair.
Next rather than trying to verify the validator commitment, let’s verify the entire Oracle update by clicking on the field called “Schnorr Signature”. A Schnorr signature is an aggregated signature formed by combining partial signatures of a quorum amount of validators.
After clicking on the Schnorr Signature field the Widget for verifying the signatures pops up. Here we see a Schnorr signature for CBBTC/USDC with a price of $65,723.46 at time 1728915742.
Just like before, clicking the Verify button will check the underlying signature against signature. You can even do this through Etherscan by plugging the signature into the isAcceptableSchnorrSignatureNow() method.
For completeness, changing any piece of the data will result in an invalid verification. In this case we change the last digit of the signature by 1.
Compatibility
Chronicle Oracles mock the same read interface as Chainlink Oracles and are therefore 100% plug-and-play compatible with Compounds existing Oracle adaptor including mocking the same number of decimals.
Conclusion
We want to thank the Compound community for considering our proposal. Oracles are a mission critical infrastructure, and Chronicle takes that responsibility extremely seriously. Chronicle is the only Oracle protocol with a track record of over 7 years under its belt without any hack/exploit and we’ve worked incredibly hard to achieve that reputation. We’re excited to work with all of you to push Compound to new heights!