Five Things Niklas Kunkel and Rune Christensen Want You to Know About Data Infrastructure

Chronicle founder Niklas Kunkel and Sky co-founder Rune Christensen recently sat down to trace the arc from the earliest days of MakerDAO to where onchain finance is headed next. The conversation moved through oracle philosophy, trust, cryptographic verification, and the infrastructure decisions that will determine whether the next phase of DeFi holds together under pressure.

The word "oracle" is the wrong frame for what is now data infrastructure

"I think we should drop the word oracle and just start calling this data infrastructure. But the second that you are combining traditional finance with onchain finance, the risk is always going to be the link from the onchain world to the off-chain world." — Niklas Kunkel, founder of Chronicle

The term "oracle" carries a narrow connotation that no longer captures what this infrastructure actually does. It’s no longer just a smart contract that reports a price.

As tokenized assets have become serious collateral and stablecoins have scaled into the tens of billions, the job has expanded into something categorically different. They’re now tasked with maintaining a trusted, verifiable connection between what exists off-chain and what protocols can act on onchain.

The rename reflects a genuine shift in what the infrastructure is being asked to do beyond delivering a number. It means they’re there to guarantee the integrity of the entire information chain that number came from.

For Chronicle, this reframing is the foundation of everything built in the last several years. Proof of Asset is a data infrastructure layer that connects directly to custodians and fund admins, rebuilds the composition of a tokenized asset from first principles, and makes every step of that process independently verifiable onchain.

Trust is earned through operational history

"There are basically a few large players that have reached this escape velocity where you just have a type of trust in them that is beyond what is just the tech. It's like a real institution in a sense. In the long run, that's the really serious value. You can always build a bunch of tech stuff. But you can't prove the intention of those who built it or those who are operating it." — Rune Christensen, co-founder of Sky

The market for data infrastructure is not won on technical whitepapers. The institutions, protocols, and allocators that matter are making trust decisions the same way consumers choose a bank. They’re asking how long it has been around and whether anything bad has ever happened to it. Chronicle went live in May 2017 and it has never had an incident.

A new entrant with better cryptography and no history isn't necessarily a safer choice for them. There’s a real Lindy effect when it comes to infrastructure because it's the only honest proxy for reliability that the market has.

Checking is cheaper than doubting

"Within the next 18 to 24 months, I think we can remove the trust component of validators completely and just switch to pure cryptography. And at that point, this umbilical cord between the real world and the onchain world will be significantly de-risked." — Niklas Kunkel, founder of Chronicle

The current oracle model relies on validator consensus where a set of trusted parties who independently observe the same data and agree on what to report. That system has worked well enough for a decade. But "trusted parties" is still a trust assumption, and trust assumptions are the thing that breaks under adversarial conditions. The next evolution is to replace that assumption with proof.

ZK verification on Ethereum has historically been too expensive to run in production but that's changing fast. There are improvements in prover software, dedicated hardware, and potential Ethereum pre-compiles that lower the onchain verification cost significantly. When verification becomes cheap enough to run continuously, protocols will be able to simply check that the data is accurate without needing to trust anybody.

Attribution is the hard problem

"We can go and read the master account, we can see that there are dollars in that account. But the second question then becomes attribution. How do you attribute those dollars to the actual outstanding stablecoin? That's really the differentiation between Chronicle Proof of Asset versus our more traditional oracles." — Niklas Kunkel, founder of Chronicle

Proving that assets exist in a custody account is one thing and another is proving whether those specific assets can be attributed to the specific product claiming them as backing. Picture a stablecoin whose reserves sit in a Fed master account shared with other liabilities, or a tokenized fund whose underlying holdings overlap with another share class, or a credit vehicle whose collateral is pledged in multiple directions. These are all examples of where attribution is needed beyond mere proof of existence.

This is where Chronicle's approach diverges from proof-of-reserve implementations. It’s designed for the worst-case scenario where the day-to-day the wrapper looks fine but there’s an urgent attribution question at the moment of liquidation. That’s exactly when there's no time to go looking for the answer offchain.

Sky's next phase runs on data infrastructure and Chronicle is the natural fit

"The big next step for Sky is the rollout of Laniakea, our native governance and data infrastructure layer. It works in such a way that eventually it will be compatible with Chronicle and the concept of oracles, trusted actors, agents — everybody that interacts with Sky. It can all be standardized around what is going to be the most secure and most valuable that directly benefits Sky." — Rune Christensen, co-founder of Sky

Sky's next architecture is Laniakea, a data infrastructure buildout designed to manage the scaling of Sky Agents as diversified, independent actors that deploy capital across a growing range of assets on Sky's behalf. The challenge that forced this buildout was the same one any system faces when it scales beyond what manual oversight can handle: how do you maintain security and consistency across many independent actors operating in parallel?

The answer Sky arrived at is data quality and data infrastructure. Formalized rules, standardized processes, and a governance layer that can be relied on by every actor in the system.

Chronicle is the natural counterpart to that architecture that partners like Sky can use to create much more advanced risk management systems that can consume this data to become more anti-fragile. The infrastructure Chronicle has spent two years building by onboarding products like BlackRock, BNY, and the full Centrifuge suite, is the supply side of the same system Sky is building the demand side for. One catalogs and verifies the tokenized asset universe, the other builds the governance and risk infrastructure to deploy into it safely.

What matters most right now is getting infrastructure right

The conversation between Niklas and Rune kept returning to the fact that the work that matters most right now is unglamorous and largely invisible to end users. None of it makes headlines but all of it determines whether the next phase of onchain finance holds together or produces the next cycle's blow-up.

The lesson for both founders who have spent a decade of DeFi is the same: the protocols that skip the infrastructure work don't stay standing long enough to benefit from the scale they were chasing.

Visit the Proof of Asset dashboard, and learn more in the Sky docs and Chronicle docs.

Disclaimer: Chronicle provides a data and verification technology platform. Chronicle Proof of Asset and related services are strictly limited to the provision of data and cryptographic proofs. Chronicle does not issue, offer, sponsor, market, manage, administer, custody, or otherwise operate any referenced products or services, or any related underlying assets. Chronicle is not acting as, and is not licensed or authorized as, any type of financial intermediary (such as an exchange, broker/dealer, investment adviser, or custodian) in connection with any referenced products or services. Any data (including data displayed on Chronicle dashboards) is provided "as is", without representations or warranties of any kind, and subject to Chronicle's applicable terms and conditions. This content is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute, and should not be relied upon as, investment, legal, tax, accounting, or other professional advice, nor an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities, tokens, or other financial instruments, or any recommendation to engage in any transaction with any such instruments.