Tellor Review

When we hear the words “blockchain” and “oracle” together, we probably think of Chainlink. Yet today we’ll talk about another similar crypto. Meet Tellor – an easy to implement solution to get high-value data into your smart contracts.

Tellor Overview

Tellor emerged in 2019, attracting Binance Labs’ attention and investments. And not without a reason. Tellor’s concept has a utility, yet there are not many similar projects. In a nutshell, Tellor has an aim to automate the transfer of off-chain data into smart-contracts. More than that, this process should be decentralized to make it secure.

As Tellor cryptocurrency had no ICO or premine, the team gets 10% from mining to support and develop the ecosystem.

According to LinkedIn, Tellor’s team consists of five people. The founders Brenda Loya (CEO), Nicholas Fett (CTO), Michael Zemrose (CSO). 

Where to buy Tellor? Bilaxy, and several other cryptocurrency exchanges.

Technology

Tellor is a decentralized oracle network which means that this network ensures the correct data input to Ethereum-based smart contracts. Contrary to Chainlink, Tellor is more focused on security and decentralization and less on speed.

The Tellor Oracle is an on-chain data storage. Miners validate the data and get rewarded in “Tributes” (TRB tokens). Tellor Tributes are used to submit a request for data. Based on a request’s reward, the Oracle selects the best-funded query every ten minutes to create a challenge for miners to solve. Each query collects specific data and makes it available on-chain. 

So how does it work? Here’s the basic flow of adding and retrieving data : 

1. The Oracle network receives a query from a user. TRB tokens are used to incentivize miners to choose this query.

2. Other users who want the same data pay this data series to further incentivize miners.

3. Every 10 minutes, the Oracle selects the best-funded query and provides a new challenge for miners to solve.

4. Miners submit their PoW solution and off-chain data point to the Oracle contract. The Oracle validates the data input and saves it on-chain. The miners get rewarded. 

5. Anyone holding TRB tokens can dispute the validity of a mined value within one day of it being mined by paying a dispute fee.  

Tellor uses the hybrid Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm to ensure the security of the network via decentralization. Along with the PoW solution, miners are also required to provide an off-chain data point. To mine, participants of the network must deposit at least 1000 tokens as a stake. This is a safeguard that ensures the correctness of data input

The Tellor Oracle is already developed and functioning on the Ethereum Rinkeby testnet and is available on Github.

TRB Token

Tellor’s Oracle network is powered by TRB tokens. These tokens are used:

• To reward miners

• For miners’ staking deposit

• To solve system disputes

Expected annual supply and growth rate. Source: Whitepaper

According to this chart, the emission rate will be decreased in the future. 

Social Channels & Community

The main Tellor’s social channels are Twitter with 3,700+ followers and Telegram with more than 2600 members. Also, updates are shared on Medium, Discord, and Youtube. The content is informative and up-to-date, which is good for keeping in touch with the community. 

Overall, nothing extraordinary, but a good start for a post-2017 crypto project. 

Summary

Tellor is somewhat similar to Chainlink, one of the most significant crypto projects. Of course, Tellor is much smaller and has a more specialized concept, yet the problem it tries to solve is the same – connecting smart contracts and real-world information. In other words, Tellor aims to be an element of global blockchain infrastructure. Such projects are rare and ambitious, yet have a high potential.

In our opinion, the strongest sides are: good development progress for a team without significant initial funding; Binance Labs as an investor; and high attention to decentralization and security of data input.

This project looks undervalued, as connecting smart contracts with real-world data is a great and quite unexplored niche. Besides, technology and development pace are pretty solid for a project of this size. 

To buy Tellor and other cryptocurrencies, try the Bilaxy crypto exchange.