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Scribe

Scribe is the name for a new type of Oracle architecture developed by the team at Chronicle Labs. The design is built around 5 pillars:

  • Scalability
  • Transparency
  • Accessibility
  • Resilience
  • Security

Scribe v1 achieves significant progress towards each pillar; however, there are more features planned that will further enhance Scribe’s STARS.

Scribe is an extremely gas-efficient Oracle based on aggregated Schnorr signatures. Providing nearly constant gas costs on Layer 2s and on Layer 1s, Scribe boasts of fixed gas costs, leading to substantial savings—over 60% relative to competing Oracles and an impressive 80% compared to Chainlink. This approach to gas management significantly boosts the scalability of the Oracle.

Prior to Scribe, architecturally, all blockchain Oracles used a standalone implementation of the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) to generate public keys to cryptographically authenticate the identity of the signer or validator and, therefore, the integrity of the reported data.

tip

The Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) signatures typically exhibit a one-to-one relationship between the signature and the signer, implying that more signers result in more signatures for an oracle response. Consequently, this leads to an increase in the volume of data that must be stored on the blockchain, resulting in higher costs due to the larger data size.

Scribe uses a novel application of Schnorr Signature cryptography, a signature, and key aggregation algorithm to create a single ‘super signature’, which is then authenticated via ECDSA.

The Chronicle Scribe Oracle interface is plug-and-play with Chainlink and Maker Oracles, providing a smooth transition for developers used to these platforms.

Why this matters​

The original ECDSA design created a tradeoff for Oracle designers. The more signers or validators that an Oracle protocol has, the more it would cost the Oracle builder/operator to update the latest reported data of the Oracle.

This is because every signer or validator must individually sign ‘the message’ to attest to its integrity.

This ultimately meant those looking to utilize oracles had to consider the pros and cons when it came to the importance of cost, speed, and decentralization.

Cheap-to-operate Oracle​

  • Pro: A low cost to update the Oracle (and therefore a low operating cost for the Oracle provider). This is achieved by having less signers attesting to the data.

  • Con: Lower security and decentralization of the Oracle protocol.

Secure and decentralized Oracle​

  • Pro: Highly secure and decentralized Oracle protocol

  • Con: A high cost to update the Oracle

Enter Scribe​

The goal with Scribe was to eliminate this tradeoff. Creating the first Oracle that could support a huge number of validators and post updated data on-chain at a low cost.

The result is an Oracle that can have unlimited validators and costs 6x less to update than Chainlink, and 3.5x less than Pyth (on L1 & L2), making it the most secure, decentralized, and cost-efficient option available.

To read more on Scribe, please see the links below

More on Scribe​