Project Spotlight: Tellor
Welcome to Kadena Eco’s Project Spotlight Series, where we highlight the groundbreaking work of organizations currently building and innovating on the Kadena blockchain!
Today, we’re shining the spotlight on ****Tellor. Tellor is a decentralized oracle protocol that incentivizes an open, permissionless network of data reporting and data validation, ensuring that data can be provided by anyone and checked by everyone.
Built for any data type, Tellor’s network of reporters supports basic spot prices, more sophisticated pricing specs (TWAP/VWAP), Snapshot Vote Results, and any custom data needs you have. If your data can be verified, Tellor can bring it on-chain!
Tellor is working with Kadena to develop an oracle service to support DeFi infrastructure on the Kadena blockchain and has completed the development of the oracle protocol in Pact, which you can view here.
What is an oracle? How does Tellor work (on the Kadena blockchain)
Oracles enable smart contracts to execute functions based on real-world events. This opens up a whole world of use casesfor these programs from insurance to dynamic NFTs, with the most popular use case being Decentralized Finance. Oracles feed asset prices to the whole of DeFi and, when oracles go bad, a lot of money can be lost. This is why it is essential to have oracles as robust and decentralized as the blockchains they’re built on top of. Tellor is our take on the best way to build an oracle. Our protocol uses crypto-economics and a slashing/dispute mechanism to incentivize an open, permissionless network of data reporting and data validation, ensuring that data can be provided by anyone and checked by everyone.
What sets Tellor apart from other oracle protocols like Chainlink?
The main comparison is indeed usually Chainlink. We are polar opposites in how we approached building our oracle protocol. Chainlink centralizes control of their oracle through a 4 of 9 multisig and whitelists all their nodes (data providers). We’ve also heard it can be quite difficult to get them to build out a feed for anything but the most popular data types. And that’s just it right there. This is crypto, and we feel things should be more protocol-to-protocol and less B2B and that’s how we built Tellor. We built it to allow anyone to “permissionlessly” request, provide, and validate any type of data to be put on-chain. This can be done without even interacting with the Tellor team, and it would continue to function if we all disappeared.
What can we expect from Tellor in the next 6 months? Where will you be in 3 years?
Our goal for 2023 is to deploy Tellor everywhere it’s needed — like on Kadena! Separate from that we have a lot cookin’ in terms of improvements to the protocol. For example, Tellor allows users to have autonomy over their feeds both in terms of customizing the data specifications but also security add-ons (stay-tuned). We are also working on decentralizing the data specifications themselves, which are currently published on github and moving them to IPFS. And lastly, we are always working on improved tooling for our reporters and users — the next thing on our plate in that regard is an automated disputer.
What attracted you to Kadena and support builders through Kadena Eco’s grants program?
Simply, though not to be understated, the alignment in Ethos around decentralization was key for us.
What advice would you give to entrepreneurs looking to innovate in blockchain?
Don’t get stuck in research mode or tied down too tightly around one design. Work fast and be as nimble as possible because 6 months in crypto is an eternity; the tech and narratives change rapidly.
How can the community participate in Tellor’s oracle service that’s currently being built on Kadena?
Obviously the main way to participate is to integrate and use the oracle in a project you’re building, and we are excited to see what the community creates. If you’d like to support this and geek-out a little with the Tellor system, a great first step is to become a reporter on Kadena testnet. This way you can actually support the onboarding of Tellor users on Kadena by providing updates to feeds and maintaining their liveness on testnet. As with everything we do, this is totally permissionless and open to anyone — it’s also just cool. We’ve made it pretty easy so head on over to docs.tellor.io to learn more.
Many thanks to Tellor for sharing their vision of what a decentralized oracle future will look like. We’ll be featuring more Project Spotlights in the coming weeks, so stay tuned as we’ll continue to profile innovative organizations that are currently building on Kadena with support from Kadena Eco, our innovation network that supports startups at every phase of their development journey.
To keep updated on Tellor’s progress, make sure to follow them on their socials:
ABOUT KADENA ECO
Kadena Eco is an innovation network fuelling mainstream adoption of Web3, DeFi, and, NFTs. We unite technical founders and entrepreneurs with the world’s top blockchain leaders, venture capitalists, and, acceleration partners to support startups at every phase of their development journey. By leveraging Kadena’s builder-centric blockchain that delivers Web3 innovation with Web2 usability, Kadena Eco aims to speed the development and adoption of meaningful applications that benefit everyday people, worldwide.