Chronicle raises $12M from Strobe, Brevan Howard

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Here’s a Tuesday morning exclusive for you: Chronicle raised $12 million in seed funding. 

The round was led by Strobe (which used to be known as Blocktower Venture Capital) with participation from Brevan Howard, 6th Man Ventures and more.

Chronicle is the first oracle on Ethereum, and it’s headed up by a group — including founder Niklas Kunkel — who were part of the founding team at MakerDAO (now Sky). 

If you don’t know what an oracle is, Kunkel explains it as putting your phone on airplane mode. Your apps then mostly become useless.

“The utility of apps that we’ve come to expect … comes from the ability to send and receive data outside of just this sandbox of a phone, and Oracle’s allow blockchains to do the same things.”

Chronicle is also a data infrastructure provider for tokenized assets, so it has built-in exposure both to DeFi and RWAs. It has its own RWA oracle called verified asset. If you’re curious about who’s using Chronicle, I’m told the list includes the likes of M^0, Centrifuge, Superstate and Securitize.

It may seem odd that the project is catering to two very different audiences. But Kunkel wishes to carry on what he saw at Sky and merge the two client bases — as I called them — given the overlap he sees.

As Kunkel noted: “If you’re a DeFi protocol, your revenue is so boom, bust with every bull and bear cycle, and it’s hard to sustainably run a company continuously like that, right?” 

But the trend he sees is more projects using products similar to traditional finance fixed income that would help smooth out the revenue. 

Kunkel feels that Chronicle’s in a “prime position” to help institutions as they get into the RWA space. Clearly, with the increase in interest for such products as well as the changing tide from the administration, this was the “ideal” time to scale the product. 

While Kunkel couldn’t give specifics, he said that there’s a “general trend” among the top 50 financial institutions looking to gain exposure to RWAs (and given Fidelity’s move this weekend, are we even surprised?). It’s a big focus for the team over the next 12 to 18 months. 

“We’re just going to see a huge wave of products coming online in Q2, Q3, Q4 … even going into next year. I think Chronicle is uniquely positioned to take advantage of that. We’re the exclusive oracle for anyone who wants to have any kind of [Sky] or buy-side action on their token item. And fortunately for us, [Sky formerly Maker] is the biggest buy-side owner of tokenized assets.”

The raise will go toward product build and research development. Kunkel had nothing but praise for the team over at Sky and noted that one of the best moves the team made back when it was Maker was to fund research. Kunkel says allowing folks to research areas of interest related — but not tied to — what the project is doing can “pay dividends for years afterward.”

While oracles in the past have been rather difficult to scale, Chronicle’s looking to build “essential infrastructure” to safely bring on TradFi. Now we’ll just have to see who walks in the door.

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