Building the Oracle Layer for Tokenized Finance with Niklas Kunkel of Chronicle Labs

“Don't try to fill a hole in the crypto market or in the traditional financial world. Try to position yourself for what the unified, hybrid system will look like. Because it's quite clear to me that the future is tokenized.”

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Niklas Kunkel is the Founder and CEO of Chronicle Labs, a leading oracle infrastructure provider securing both decentralized finance and the rapidly growing market for tokenized real-world assets. Formerly a core contributor at MakerDAO, Niklas helped architect the original DAI stablecoin system — designing the first generation of Ethereum oracles and building foundational infrastructure long before DeFi existed as an industry.

Today at Chronicle, Niklas focuses on the critical problem of connecting off-chain financial data to on-chain markets with the reliability, security, and transparency required by institutions. His team provides oracle infrastructure for tokenized money market funds, private credit, stablecoins, and next-generation financial products issued by firms like BlackRock, Apollo, Janus Henderson, and Superstate.

Operating at the intersection of blockchain, data security, and institutional asset management, Niklas brings a rare perspective across both crypto-native and traditional financial systems. His work is helping define how tokenized assets are priced, monitored, and integrated into automated on-chain markets — and why robust oracle infrastructure is becoming core to the future of tokenized finance.

Please enjoy the following insights from Niklas Kunkel of Chronicle Labs.

Why Every Asset Will Be Tokenized

Niklas Kunkel of Chronicle argues that tokenization isn’t happening because of ideology — it’s happening because of pure utility. Once an asset becomes a token, it can do far more: be used as collateral, earn yield, provide liquidity, or even be leveraged through credit looping. In token form, a financial asset becomes dramatically more useful.

🎬 Watch: How Tokenization Unlocks Real Utility for Every Asset

https://youtube.com/shorts/2Snfh_q7naI?feature=share

Why DeFi Needs Non-Crypto Revenue

DeFi revenue still rises and falls with token prices — booming when markets surge and evaporating the moment prices turn. The next step is building income streams that aren’t tied to crypto cycles.

🎬 Watch: Why Sustainable DeFi Depends on Real-World Revenue

https://youtube.com/shorts/wsQ2hlATIsM?feature=share

The Oracle Outage That Taught DeFi a Critical Lesson

Niklas Kunkel recalls how early MakerDAO oracles assumed gas fees would never exceed 10 Gwei — because they’d only ever seen 1 Gwei in practice. That assumption broke in 2017, when ICO demand pushed fees hundreds of times higher and froze the entire oracle system. The takeaway: hard-coding assumptions creates massive systemic risk.

🎬 Watch: The 2017 Gas Spike That Broke Early DeFi Oracles

https://youtube.com/shorts/HLsuzn36hjY?feature=share

Why a Single Bad Oracle Price Can Break an Entire Protocol

Niklas Kunkel explains how dangerous oracle mispricing can be. If an oracle overreports the value of an asset — say Ether is suddenly read as worth a billion dollars — users could post a tiny amount of collateral and borrow an outsized amount of capital, resulting in immediate insolvency of the entire system.

🎬 Watch: How Oracle Errors Can Collapse a Stablecoin Protocol

https://youtube.com/shorts/xJJMCF-WLgg?feature=share

🎬 Watch the Full Episode

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