The Chronos Protocol is a smart contract automation platform.

Using the knowledge the ChronoLogic team has gained through the process of rebooting the Ethereum Alarm Clock project, we are designing and building a new smart contract protocol from the ground up.

The Ethereum Alarm Clock allows users to schedule transactions for the future based on the conditions of block number or timestamp.

For the Chronos protocol, we are generalizing the conditions and allowing for any arbitrary smart contract state to trigger executions.

The executions are triggered by a decentralized network of executors known as TimeNodes, which are incentivized by the bounty submitted by the scheduler.

The Chronos protocol will use signed messages as the primitive to indicate a scheduled transaction.

Using signed messages instead of deploying smart contracts for each scheduled transaction (how it is done in the Ethereum Alarm Clock) will vastly reduce gas costs — bringing the cost of the scheduling action itself down to 0.

The Ethereum Alarm Clock has a front-running problem. We’ve patched this by integrating a complex pending transaction pool watching and caching system. It’s not perfect and still will allow transaction collisions to happen under certain circumstances.

The Chronos protocol will introduce a novel claiming mechanism that cryptoeconomically ensures to a (high probability) that a transaction collision will not take place.

In summary the three major innovations of the Chronos protocol are as follows:

Generalized conditional scheduling. Signed Messages as Scheduled Transaction primitive. Claiming Mechanism that mitigates transaction collisions.

The stages of Chronos so far have been: