Tellor (TRB)

 Basics

• Founded in:
• Mainnet release: 8-2019
• Based in:

History

• From the FAQ (14-8-2020):

"We originally set out to build Tellor because our previous startup, Daxia (a derivatives protocol on Ethereum) needed an oracle.  Daxia created tokens that would represent the short or long side of crypto pricing pairs, BTC/USD for example. We relied on a centralized oracle to provide the price data points to settle the contracts. We knew this didn’t fit with our ambitions to be a fully decentralized protocol and so we set out to find a decentralized oracle that would fit our needs. That solution didn’t exist. So we set out to build it ourselves."

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].
• They failed their first audit, which made them redesign their oracle (11-2018). Had their second audit done by Certik in June 2019.

Bugs/Exploits

• From their blog (22-11-2022):

"On 17/09/2022 we received a bug report from @paco0x (https://twitter.com/paco0x), detailing a vulnerability in Liquity’s TellorCaller.sol contract - specifically, that Liquity uses its fallback oracle Tellor in an unsafe way, allowing an attacker to make Liquity see a fake ETH-USD price from Tellor at relatively low attack cost. The Tellor team has now implemented a custom fix which makes Liquity’s usage of Tellor safe again. The bug was due to Liquity’s incorrect usage of Tellor, and as far as we know Tellor remained secure since its launch. No user funds were at risk prior to the fix since Liquity was purely using price data from its primary oracle, Chainlink."

Token

Launch

• From the FAQ (14-8-2020):

"We did no ICO, no premine, and have worked tirelessly to build an active community of philosophically aligned individuals with a highly distributed token supply."

Token allocation

• From the FAQ (16-8-2020):

"We will use a Constant Issuance method. Tellor mints a fixed amount each block and the token supply grows at a fixed number each year, thus creating a gradually decreasing money supply growth rate.

The dev-share is 10%, meaning that 10% of all mining rewards will not go to miners but to the Tellor team instead. "

Utility

• From the website (14-8-2020):

"The Tellor Tribute, the native token of the Tellor Oracle, incentivizes miners to provide data, keeps the oracles secure and allows DApps to request and access to on-chain data."

• From the FAQ (16-8-2020):

"Besides their obvious use to incentivize miners through base rewards, Tellor Tributes are used for miners’ staking deposit as well as for the system’s dispute fee. Additionally, ownership of the Tellor token is utilized as aggregation unit for calculating votes in disputes."

• Has written a Tokenomics (19-2-2020) blog to go into more details.

Tech

• Whitepaper can be found here.
• Code can be viewed here (14-8-2020).
• Built on: Ethereum
• Programming language used:

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS):
• Latency:

How it works

• From the FAQ (14-8-2020):

"The system utilizes a network of staked miners that compete to solve a PoW challenge to submit the official value for requested data."

Upgrades

• Has a V2 upgrade in the works (4-2020).

Mining

• From the FAQ (16-8-2020):

"Miners must stake 1000 Tributes in order to participate."

Different Implementations

• From the FAQ (16-8-2020):

"The Tellor system can work on most other chains with smart contract functionality.  However, we’ve chosen to create a unique system we call our Alternate Chain Structure (ACS) for implementing Tellor on other chains."

Oracle Method

• From the FAQ (14-8-2020):

"The Tellor Oracle is an on-chain data bank where miners compete to add the data points. To create a properly incentivized system Tellor mints a native token, “Tributes.” Parties pay Tellor Tributes to submit a request for data to the Oracle.  Based upon the reward assigned to each request, the Oracle selects the best funded query every ten minutes to create a challenge for miners to solve. Each query collects specific data (e.g. ETH/USD or BTC/USD prices) and makes it available on-chain. Proof-of-work has proven to be the gold standard for crypto economic consensus mechanisms and Tellor utilizes it within a hybrid model to secure the oracle. In addition to the security provided by the PoW process, we have added an additional layer of security through the deposit of Tributes which miners are required to stake before they are allowed to mine and risk losing their stake if their submitted values are successfully challenged.

It is important to have a mechanism to challenge data values submitted by bad actors should there be any on our network. Any Tribute token holder can initiate a challenge by paying a fee in tokens. The challenged submission then goes into a 7 day voting period where all Tribute holders vote on the validity of the data." 

Roadmap

• A vision roadmap can be found here (16-1-2020).
• The whitepaper https://docs.tellor.io/tellor/whitepaper/introduction mentions]:

1. Zero-knowledge submissions 
2. TLS Notary Proofs
3. Optimistic Implementation
4. Automatic Reporting and monitoring

Usage

• Claims they have passed 100 miners in 9-2019.

Competition

• From the FAQ (16-8-2020):

"Our competitors have different philosophical views when it comes to decentralization. Similar to how Ethereum, EOS, and Hyperledger all have different models when it comes to who ultimately secures their protocol, Tellor aims to be a system that is truly censorship resistant and transparent in its approach.  We’ve built a crypo-economic system that ensures accuracy and liveness all while being completely open for anyone to become a data reporter or validator and take part in the system. This approach contrasts starkly from competition who use centralized whitelisting, reputation of known parties, or other trusted architectures in their methodology. In addition to the pure tech side, token distribution of your governance protocol matters. We did no ICO, no premine, and have worked tirelessly to build an active community of philosophically aligned individuals with a highly distributed token supply."

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Truly decentralized oracle for Ethereum

Cons

• Slow data retrieval mechanism not for for real-time data
• Storing data on Ethereum is expensive and inefficient
• Limits itself (26-11-2019) to price data between currencies.

Team, Funding, Partners

Team

• Full team can be found [here].
• Brenda Loya; CEO
• Nicholas Fett; CTO
• Michael Zemrose; CSO

Funding

• MakerDAO, Binance Labs and Consensys (a grant) are an investors (16-8-2020).

Partners 

• Has a partnership with Linear Finance (9-2020).