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FAQs

FAQs​

ELI5 What is Chronicle?​

Chronicle is a system that leverages the public Ethereum blockchain to add verifiable timestamps to digital data. This can be used to prove the existence of data at a point in time, and further mint it into a fully stateful NFT onchain if desired.

How is Chronicle different from OpenTimestamps?​

Chronicle's design is inspired by OpenTimestamps, but it differs in a few ways. The primary theme is that OpenTimetsamps is a system for timestamping data on Bitcoin, while Chronicle is a system for timestamping data on Ethereum.

While this seems like a small difference in choice of blockchains, the implications are actually much larger. With things like the ERC721 token standard, Ethereum illustrates unique capabilities of representing and programming on top of provenance via its richly expressive execution environment. By extending the data points of provenance natively available to this execution environment, Chronicle can bring new scale to these usecases.

How is Chronicle different from sidechains like Polygon PoS or xDAI/Gnosis Chain?​

When you capture provenance on Chronicle, it's truly native to Etheruem. Thanks to the properties of Chronicle's data structure, you can trustlessly promote your provenance into a fully stateful NFT onchain, without needing to trust any third parties. In contrast, sidechains like Polygon PoS or Gnosis Chain require you to trust the sidechain's validator set for things like accessing your provenance or bridging its provenance to Ethereum's L1.