Brief
Tellor is a decentralized Oracle for bringing high value off-chain data onto Ethereum. The system utilizes a network of staked miners that compete to solve a PoW challenge to submit the official value for requested data. Tokens are mined with every successful Tellor data point and the company takes a 10% dev share to support the development of the ecosystem.
Q&A
Q: Can you tell me a bit about yourself and how did you get into crypto?
Nick: Hi everyone, I’m Nick, I’m the CTO. I’m actually an economist by training but have built out our platform into something pretty novel and secure. I got into crypto back at the end of the fed rally and then started building out trading bots for a few years before I joined the CFTC (US crypto regulator). I left that 3 years ago to do a derivatives startup and luckily pulled Brenda out of the government with me.
Brenda: Hi I’m Brenda Loya. I’m the CEO of Tellor. I studied economics and previously I used to be a supervisor with the U.S Federal government, developing and leading teams to develop statistical software. I was initially attracted to Ethereum because of the potential I see in being able to write smart contracts. I love the technology and what it can do for people. I’m here because I want to be part of this transition.
Mike: Hey everyone, I’m Mike, CSO. Been an entrepreneur for 13 years or so. I got into crypto back in 2013 when I was consulting for a small bitcoin merchant services startup. They paid me my first bitcoins! So I got interested pretty quickly as you can imagine. Later on met Nick and Brenda and joined them to build Daxia in 2017. This then became the Tellor team. Nick, will give a little more detail on that in this next question.
Q: Can you give us a little history of Tellor and TRB?
Nick: Sure, so the project grew out of necessity for our last project Daxia, which was building derivatives on Ethereum. We needed a decentralized oracle and there weren’t any out there that fit the bill, so we made one ourselves. Once we had the design down, we got accepted to Binance Labs and found there was more buzz about the oracle piece than the derivatives, so we moved on to doing it full time.
Q: What is your favorite DEFI App and why?
Mike: To be honest, I personally don’t have a favorite. I think there’s a lot growing to do in these protocols still. I think the next crop of apps are what I’m keeping my eye on.
Nick: sigh…but yeah I like a lot of projects that are just doing cool things. So AMPL is experimenting with stablecoins, tBTC or even Atomic Loans are playing around with trustless BTC, and then I obviously love dexes and other simple to understand pieces that are just getting better.
Mike: I think the next wave is gonna be really exciting.
Q: Which DEFI applications do you see that can benefit the most from Tellor?
Nick: Most of them! I really think that having a stablecoin, a derivatives platform, and a lending platform using Tellor would be a big boon for the space because then we could have a space that didn’t have weird centralization caveats to each of the main players.
Q: What are the top 3 differences between Tellor and ChainLink?
Mike: 1) We did no ICO or premine and our team only holds about 9% of the supply. 2) Our philosophies are completely different: They define data quality from reputation of nodes, private API access, and things of that nature. We define quality by the ability of the network providing that data to be unstoppable, censorship-resistant, and decentralized through sound crypto-economics. 3) Our network is open. Chainlink themselves control who can be a node/data provider (through whitelisting) and therefore the team themselves are a potential point of failure for the network.
Q) How many price feeds can the protocol support?
Nick: So right now, we support 51 different feeds, but we’re able to support most numeric inputs. Right now we’re primarily focused on DeFi, so its a lot of crypto prices, but if you have a data need that you want us to support, just reach out and we can show you how to add it.
Q) What is the token’s role in the network?
Brenda: Our token, Tributes, does 3 main things:
1. Provide security by incentivizing miners as base rewards, required as a staking deposit, and for our dispute fee and voting.
2. Creates a robust and active Tellor ecosystem and community by diversely distributing ownership of our tokens (due to PoW).
3. Sustainability — We run on a dev-share and we are incentivized to continue to grow and improve Tellor forever.
You do not get a reward just for holding. They have to stake to be able to mine but can only earn TRB if they actively mine.
If you want to read more on our token model, we have quite a few medium articles too: https://medium.com/@tellor/tellor-security-and-rewards-1e365e1be8ae
Q) Now that Tellor is mined by mining pools how does this affect the network’s decentralization?
Nick: So Tellor’s security is mainly through the disputing/staking process, so the miners and how many there are really comes secondary. The decentralization is mainly achieved in a Bitcoin-like sense that a) the ultimate truth is up to the community (disputing) and b) anyone can come in and compete with them (so it’s not like they can just stop and shut down Tellor).
Q) Is it possible to track how many individual miners are mining from the Pool?
Nick: Um, maybe you could reach out to the pools, but it’s not really something we track.
Q) Out of all Ethereum Killers which one do you think has the best chance?
Nick: Sure, so it’s tough to say lol. I mean I think it might even be an L2 on ethereum at this point. Most of the eth killers just need to get launched and decentralized and then we can talk from there.
Mike: I share that sentiment.
Q) How will ETH 2.0 affect Tellor?
Nick: Nothing but positive. I think as long as we can actually get it launched and not have it break or cause some catastrophic loss of funds, it should be awesome since we’re built on Ethereum and have so many txns on mainnet.
Q) What are the main changes in Tellor V2
Nick: So to just post from our article on it:
- Increase number of data points added per block (5 from 1)
- Increase speed (reduce the 10 min difficulty target to 5)
- Limiting rewards per miner
- No time limit on disputes
- Multiple round disputes
- General code improvements
- Token fee burning
so yeah..awesome stuff!
Q) What is the teams favorite project in crypto besides Tellor?
Mike: We love Trueblocks (Thomas Jay Rush needs to be heard more), Dune Analytics (fellow Binance Labs project) they made something the community needed and i honestly haven’t met a single person who doesn’t think highly of Dune. And lastly, BuidlHub — doing cool stuff with automated interaction with smart contracts.
Q) Besides crypto what technology are you most bullish on?
Nick: tough one. I think privacy things (non-crypto related) is going to be a big thing in years to come. And there’s obviously a big difference between things I hope we see and things I expect to see.
Arthur: And our time’s up! Thanks again to the Tellor team for taking the time! We will also be publishing the AMA on our Medium tomorrow 😊
Nick: Awesome guys! Thanks for the questions and best of luck with trading.
Brenda: Thank you all for all the great questions.
Mike: Was a pleasure.
Want to learn more about Tellor or keep track of their exciting progress? Official links below:
Website: https://www.tellor.io/
Whitepaper: https://www.tellor.io/whitepaper/
Github: https://github.com/tellor-io/TellorCore
Audit by Certik: www.tellor.io/audit
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WeAreTellor
Discord: http://discord.gg/n7drGjh
Telegram: https://t.me/tellorchannel
Medium: https://medium.com/@tellor
