According to CoinDesk, Chronicle, the second largest oracle provider that safeguards over $5 billion for MakerDAO and its ecosystem, announced its expansion outside of the MakerDAO ecosystem with a new protocol that makes oracles available on various networks. The Chronicle Protocol will first launch on Polygon zkEVM to service the fast-growing ecosystem and lay the foundation for integrating another of Chronicle’s key partners, Spark Protocol.

The service will use an estimated 60% less gas fees compared to other providers, which is essential for driving platform usage as oracles are currently one of the largest cost centers for blockchains and DeFi protocols. Oracles are blockchain-based services that fetch data from outside a blockchain and help provide reliable data to blockchain-based services and products for users.

Chronicle will feature a dashboard that users can access to track the origin of any required data, ensuring on-chain data transparency. It will run on data supplied by over 22 node operators, such as Infura, Etherscan, Gnosis, Gitcoin, Argent, MakerDAO, and dYdX. Chronicle founder Niklas Kunkel, who co-developed the first oracle on Ethereum in 2017, emphasized the importance of verifiable oracles at scale for the integrity of DeFi and the unique positioning of Chronicle in a space dominated by a single provider.