Tellor’s Consensys Grant Journey

There we were for another day of Devcon fun, eating some cold and strange breakfast pastry in Osaka, Japan, when we heard that we were receiving a grant from Consensys. Needless to say we had an extra pep in our step that afternoon, and even took note as the clouds parted and the sun shined bright over the bay. A crowd had gathered in the graffiti laden amphitheater to hear Vlad Zamfir speak, and everyone began shuffling in their swag bags to pull out cheap branded sunglasses in order to shield their eyes from not the brightness of the newly unveiled sunshine, but at the Tellor team’s beåles as we passed by.

“Look, there goes Nick Fett, Brenda Loya, and Mike Zemrose of Tellor, they’re so hot right now,” we heard someone say. We were amazed at how fast news travels at Devcon and strengthened with thought of getting support from the Consensys grants team as we entered a pivotal time for our projects development. This was October of 2019 and Tellor had only just launched to mainnet in August. We had bootstrapped our network of data reporting miners and proud nothing was breaking in our protocol; but there was so much still to do to ensure we could deliver on our mission of decentralizing that pesky yet pivotal piece of infrastructure that is the oracle.

We got back home from Japan and got to work. Looking back, some of these ToDos look trivial compared to what is on our current roadmap. But such is the nature of past achievements, right? In reality these milestones were very important small steps in the post launch process of our network. One thing we always believed is you can’t launch to mainnet with everything perfect or you’ll spend an eternity on testnet. So we knew we would launch and continue to upgrade, add, and improve every day thereafter. Here’s what we set out to do in the weeks immediately following our consensys grant onboarding:

Milestones

GPU Miner

• Similar to other large coins, we wanted our community to have the ability to mine TRB using graphics cards. This software makes the PoW aspect of Tellor more robust by allowing us to bring on more miners with better systems, thus making the values in our contracts an order of magnitude more secure.

Automatic Disputer

• The automatic disputer is a way for parties to fact check submitted tellor values and flag them for dispute without having to do this manually.

‘Using Tellor’ NPM package

• This package allows users to get up and running with Tellor quickly and easily.

Updated Documentation

• Not the flashiest of updates, but things like this are the hallmarks of quality projects and support adoption and usage. We want to make sure we maintain high standards and our docs have come a long way in the last few months.

Finalize Alternate Chain Design

• In order to implement a Tellor oracle on a side-chain, like Matic for example, a separate system has to be developed. In our case we want to create a separate PoS network that would utilize a token bridge.

As of April 2020, all of our milestones were achieved and we are hard at work on even more exciting things. We believe that staying lean, iterative, and focused has helped us tremendously from our inception, through to mainnet launch, and through these milestones.

Recently we’ve had a few of the largest mining pools begin adopting the mining of our token, TRB, on their platforms — like F2pool, Blackpool, and BTC.com. This has done a lot to spread worldwide awareness of our network and with that we become stronger. We wouldn’t have been nearly this far along hadn’t we committed to upgrading and updating our miner software. Additionally we just received a grant from the Matic team to implement our Alternate Chain Structure on their chain. Soon we’ll have our oracle bringing secure off-chain values to an entirely separate network from Ethereum, and potentially an entirely new set of users.

All in all, we feel strongly that these last fruitful months have laid a great foundation for our mission; to enable censorship-resistant applications though decentralizing the oracle. It’s more apparent than ever that Ethereum and other networks have to take the oracle problem as seriously as they take the consensus mechanisms of their layer 1 protocols. And through that the bigger mission of the entire blockchain and crypto community can be achieved.

Our grant from Consensys has been instrumental in supporting our progress over the last few months. The funds themselves were a fundamental resource that helped fuel our efforts and along with that, the publicity of being vetted and supported by Consensys came at an important time in the nascent stages of Tellor.