Five Ways Niklas Kunkel and Greg Di Prisco Think Oracles Are at a Crossroads Moment

Chronicle founder Niklas Kunkel and M0 co-founder Greg Di Prisco met again to discuss stablecoins and more. They dove into the evolution of oracles, what’s missing today, and what the infrastructure for stablecoins and other tokenized assets actually needs to look like to support what's coming. It was also an opportunity to reminisce on their shared MakerDAO days. Keep reading to get a summary of what they're thinking.

Stablecoins and tokenization are here to stay

"Stablecoins are actually better alternatives to bank deposits and they're probably gonna take over the whole economy and we're all gonna be using them one day." — Greg Di Prisco, co-founder of M0 What's happening now with stablecoins and tokenization is structurally different from previous DeFi cycles. The largest fintechs, asset managers, and custodian banks in the world are actively building stablecoin and tokenization infrastructure. The truth is stablecoins and tokenized assets have proven to be superior technology over the traditional financial rails that exist without them today. Their original purpose was to give users an onchain asset that isn’t subject to volatility. However, they turned out to be a fundamental rethinking of how money moves and what it can do. Now, stablecoin adoption is expected to bring trillions onchain over the next few years. This means that the infrastructure layer underneath stablecoins and tokenized assets becomes essential as these markets grow. That’s especially true for oracles as the part that connects off-chain reality to onchain state.

Different asset classes demand entirely different verification architectures

"In terms of validation, it's going to be different for every product. It's totally bespoke as to the metadata that's going to be attached to the asset." — Greg Di Prisco, co-founder of M0 A portfolio of crypto loans and a real estate investment trust do not share the same verification challenges. One requires tracking loan performance, collateral health, and drawdown events in near real-time. The other requires locating property deeds, confirming ownership, checking for liens and outstanding liabilities, and verifying that claimed cash flows are actually being generated. This is true for stablecoins, as well. As they expand beyond short-term treasuries and tokenized assets and move into private credit, CLOs, equities, and infrastructure financing, the verification architecture has to evolve with them. There's no universal oracle model that serves all of these use cases. What we can have, however, is a single layer that adapts to each asset class. This is what Chronicle is doing with the Proof of Asset framework. Chronicle's core thesis is that as asset classes diversify, the informational demands on the oracle layer diversify with them. Building a shared layer for that range of informational shapes is what the next phase of oracle infrastructure looks like.

Oracles have fundamentally evolved, they're no longer just price feeds

"When oracles started in 2016, 2017, they were doing something very, very different than they are today. Through tokenization taking center stage and stablecoins — as soon as you step away from crypto-native assets and need this tethering to traditional financial assets — the role of the oracle has really evolved." — Niklas Kunkel, founder of Chronicle The mental model most people carry for an oracle is that of a smart contract that tells a DeFi protocol what a token is worth. This was accurate for a narrow period of time but that period is over. What Chronicle is doing for M0's issuers today is attesting that reserves are present before stablecoins can be minted, and confirming that tokens have been burned before underlying reserves can be released. That's a verification of real-world financial state that goes beyond price feeds. The general principle here is that whenever there's a connection between the untokenized world and the tokenized world, there needs to be verifiable information transfer. The oracle now has the responsibility to be the institution-grade bridge between those two worlds and act as a trust layer with real financial consequences attached to every output.

Continuous NAV is the next frontier

"A lot of the collateral behind stablecoins is becoming tokenized. In order for an issuer to interact with tokenized collateral, they need that continuous NAV to know the price that they're buying it at in an atomic way."— Greg Di Prisco, co-founder of M0 Traditional finance is comfortable with daily NAV strikes, end-of-day reporting, monthly statements, and quarterly audits. None of that is fast enough for what DeFi protocols actually need when they integrate tokenized assets as collateral or liquidity primitives. That’s why Chronicle is seeing demand for continuous NAVs. If a stablecoin issuer needs to interact with a tokenized fund position at a point-in-time price, they need the number right away. Chronicle's approach is to anchor to the official struck NAV from the fund admin and then provide continuous updates within tightly bounded constraints, tracking how far the live estimate can move from the official anchor. It's a new data infrastructure model that didn't exist in TradFi and doesn't fit neatly into the existing oracle category either. The gap between what traditional fund administration can provide and what DeFi needs is exactly the space Chronicle is building into. Shared MakerDAO origins were formative as tokenization becomes crypto’s PMF "I think the same values that we evolved at Maker — a focus on rigorous security, rigorous diligence — is something that Greg brought to M0 and that I brought to Chronicle. Working together became very organic after that." — Niklas Kunkel, founder of Chronicle Niklas and Greg both came out of MakerDAO, one of the first onchain credit engines and a core foundation for what has become the whole sector of tokenized real-world assets. That has informed an operating philosophy they both share around security, diligence, and not cutting corners under pressure. In the early days of MakerDAO, the stakes for solving the oracle problem were high because a wrong oracle print could cause protocol insolvency. The institutional knowledge Chronicle built under these financial stakes is the same knowledge that shapes how Chronicle approaches verification today. This is critical for M0, since it operates as infrastructure for stablecoin issuers and builders rather than a consumer-facing product. M0 needs a battle-tested oracle provider to ensure the operational stability of all the products that are built on top of its infrastructure. That depth of familiarity with the underlying system architecture for tokenization is what the relationship with Chronicle is built on.

What all of this is building toward

For Chronicle and M0, the work being done now is infrastructure work that’s largely invisible to end users. But the protocols, the issuers, and the allocators who get this layer right are the ones that will still be standing when the market scales. The collaboration between M0 and Chronicle is about foundational infrastructure. As stablecoins grow, the need for high-quality oracle infrastructure grows with them. Watch the full conversation between Niklas and Greg, visit the Proof of Asset dashboard, and learn more in the M0 docs and Chronicle docs.