Links
Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP7_ZunoJsM&t=11s&ab_channel=Tellor
Project website: www.tellor.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WeAreTellor?s=20
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/n7drGjh
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TellorOfficial/
Summary
A long review of Tellor’s year. Achievements, events, bumps along the road, everything that made this year great. After the review, some questions asked by the community members were also answered.
Whole discussion
Mike: Hey everyone, welcome again, to another edition of the Tellor community call. It’s December 28th. Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and happy holidays. I hope everybody’s excited for the new year. We certainly are, and we thought we would do, this was a perfect day to do a year in review. Every year since Tellor has existed, we’ve done a year in review article and we’re going to put one out. Ryan, when are we pushing that out? Today? Or have we decided?
Ryan: Yeah.
Mike: Cool. So, we’re going to publish that today and I thought it’d be good to use this community call as a means to reminisce about 2021 and kind of go over the content that’s in the article really, but more of an informal in person zoom version of the article that we’re pushing out. I guess we could just kick it off and then afterwards we’ll have some questions, so stick around to the end if you’re interested in hearing your question answered, or you just like listening to the questions in general. We have about seven of them, I think.
Alright, so 2021. We got rewind back, because a lot happened in 2021 and we’ve been thinking of it as quite a rollercoaster ride for Tellor, for the team. It’s almost hard to imagine because Tellor was so different in early 2021. The team was much smaller. We did our first hires in 2020. We brought on Tally and Ryan, we had JG who left, but we had JG and Krassi for a while, who and they are no longer on the team, but they were with us for a good chunk of 2020 and into 2021 as well. So, the team looked a lot different. I just recently looked back at our year review from 2020 and looked at... the last paragraph we talk about like okay, so what are we looking forward to in 2021 or then in the next year, just to see how we did. And I think, I’ll touch on that as we sort of dive in, but I think a good format is to, let’s start with the very beginning of course, quarter one. We’ll just look at it in terms of quarters and I think quarter one was really rounding out 2020, hitting the ground running. We had a number of things in the works. One of them was our first vertical product which was Chorus, and if you looked at what we were saying, we were going to do in 2021, one of the things that we really wanted to start doing is exploring the idea of building our own users, our own vertical products, and we had this thing that we’ve been tinkering around with. Nick’s little economic brainchild, Chorus protocol, which is an open-source community currency protocol. I don’t even know if the website’s still up. Chorus.dollar.io. You can guys check it out, who haven’t been here that long, we’re still really proud of course, it just, well, we learned a lot of things, one was, it doesn’t matter how much we like this thing, we couldn’t... There’s two things we didn’t immediately find, users for it. It wasn’t just like a smash success, and that could be, we just didn’t have the marketing budget for it, or just the biz dev budget for it. I think ultimately what we learned from that is that in order to keep the Tellor team focused and the right size and all that stuff. What do I want to say here. We would have had to expand quite a bit and almost create a separate team for Chorus and really push that and it was ultimately a big distraction to what we were actually really trying to focus on and prioritize with Tellor. So, it didn’t come super easy, where we could just launch, we got a cool idea, we launched a white paper and a website build, a beta version of it and just it out there and it’ll just go like it’s not... it wasn’t that easy. And that’s where it hung, just kind of stayed there. Ultimately, we just decided to no longer prioritize it. It’s all published online, it’s there, we can revisit it, but it was a good learning experience for us and I think maybe our vision of doing a lot more of that in 2021 didn’t pan out, but I think it didn’t pan out because we decided it was actually not the right priority for Tellor, because we had a bigger fish to fry. We wanted to get, Tellor was still and it still is an unfinished product. We want to, we need to get more users, we need to get our first users, so that was the tale of Chorus. What else Ryan? What else happened in quarter one?
Ryan: Just to expand on the course, the reason we built like a bare skeleton structure was because we knew it was an ambitious project right off the bat, so we just wanted to get that out and get that in the open and then obviously we had Eth Denver, which was a huge even, but it was virtual, which was kind of... I mean it was my first Eth Denver, but it’s a huge even for the Ethereum space in general, so that took a big chunk of quarter one, just getting that virtual booth up and running and then making sure that we were utilizing that metaverse wisely.
Mike: Actually, thinking of where things ended up now with the metaverse being even a coin term, it wasn’t a thing back then. But it was a metaverse for a virtual conference.
Ryan: This was like the early rumblings of NFT, everything that exploded this year was. Essentially Denver was kind of the ground zero for all that.
Mike: It was our first big conference, it was Eth Denver, our favorite conference, other than like DevCon, which who knows when we’ll have another DevCon. Tellor’s never had a DevCon. We’ve, it’s always been like, right, well, it’s Japan anyway.... Yeah, Tellor did have a DevCon, we were in Japan for that, but it was really early, so it almost doesn’t count, because we were nobodies. Anyway, Eth Denver is our, a lot of people on the team’s favorite, and there’s the community in general. It’s the most fun, has the most charisma, Denver’s a cool place, they always do something cool and then for them to announce that, because of covid, it was going to be virtual. It was such a bummer, because we really wanted to, you know, we felt we were finally ready. Remember Ryan, we were talking about like, we feel like we’re. It’s so funny, because we weren’t ready, but at the time we felt like we were ready sort of arrive on the scene and we wanted to sponsor a conference and meet our peers and meet users and do all that stuff, and then boom. It’s like, sorry, it’s going to be on a video game now. Like, have fun. And we ran through a demo of what it looked like and it was just like one of those things where you’re like cool, this could be great, and then when we got off the call with them, we were like, man this is way overly ambitious and I don’t see them pulling it off at all. It’s going to be a gimmick, it might not work, who knows how this is going to be like. We don’t even know if we’re going to get any value out of it, but we were like pot committed and optimistic. I don’t know but Ryan, what would you say?
Ryan: They definitely were dealing with the cards they were dealt, and I thought of all the virtual conferences it definitely added that extra element besides just being a zoom conference. I thought we made a lot of good touches, connections there, better name that tune event, which was a big hit and just being able to kind of jump around in the metaverse, I thought. I had a great experience.
Mike: Yeah, we had a lot of fun, it was, it turned out to be, I thought really great. There was a huge success for what they were trying to do. It was the most fun I ever had in a virtual conference, since they started doing them in early covid. It was great, that contest we did was a big success, a ton of people came, we posted pictures on twitter and we’re going to post some in the article for you guys that are, maybe can’t picture what we’re talking about, but it was a ton of fun and it got. It was a chance for us to show our character, as a team. We were like a growing team at that point, but you know, we wanted to establish ourselves and we’re hoping to do that in person. We’re going to do that in person this Eth Denver, which is in a couple months, but really get a chance to share with the world that the approachability of our team, from a developer standpoint to pretty much to a user integration standpoint, to marketing standpoint, just in general our team. And hopefully you guys feel the same way with how we do these zoom calls and how we are in our discord, but you know we think that we’re an approachable team that people like to work with and that’s another aspect to getting users, that isn’t talked about much. There’s like, are you a technical fit for that product, but also ultimately does, do you like working with that product? Do you like the people there? There’s still, there’s the human connection. It makes a huge difference, people don’t always recognize it when it’s happening, but anyway, it’s one of our strong suits that we hadn’t, we still haven’t really got a chance to flex, so hopefully we get a chance to do that in 2022. That’s so weird even saying that. So, we’re still in Q1, a lot of things happen in Q1, it seems. Maybe it just feels that way because we had a pretty large bump in the road that happened at the end of the quarter. Well, it wasn’t really, it was February 15th, so...
Ryan: Smack dab in the middle.
Mike: Does Q2 begins in April? Yeah. So, February 15th, we had, we suffered a major setback during a relatively routine upgrade, it was v2.6.1. We wrote a whole breakdown of postmortem that we published and we’ll share that with you guys, for those of you who are curious, if you guys want to relive that. So, we don’t need super rehash it, all you guys need to know, the cliff notes are that we froze the Tellor contract, the actual contract that has the token, meaning the network was frozen basically and we had to fork, because the only way to fix it was to essentially fork. Launch a new Tellor contract and start migrating over everybody. So, this all happened when we do these upgrades, you know, we’re usually some of us are on a zoom call together and it’s really pretty routine, but we sort of just make, you know, we have to be careful and we have a process, that process was greatly improved after this happened for obvious reasons, but we had a process before to make sure things went smoothly, but things are crazy in crypto as anybody can tell you. And a mistake was made, that was really costly, but it was just so sudden, when these things happen, it’s like not broken one minute, then a transaction goes through and it is. And then it’s like, how do you process what’s happening in front of you? As you know, live it was just interesting experience to see how our team handled the things going nuclear you know, and it was ultimately really positive because within a week’s time we had, we assessed, we had the initial reaction to what happened. Then we sat and accepted, it was like going through all the emotions of grief or whatever it is, but we got quickly snapped out of it. Got a plan together, got the team to rally, and it was just something that we look back at as something we’re really proud of. It’s annoying that it happened, we’re on the other side of it now. It was, we got away relatively unscathed you know, no one really lost any tokens and we had to spend a lot of money on gas and stuff, and we had to go through this crazy migration process that Ryan, you were a big part of as well, but everybody was a big part of the team. It kind of took all hands-on deck, because you can imagine. So, we needed everybody who was a TRB token holder, had to run a process, run a transaction to essentially claim their new Tellor tokens in an exact one-to-one ratio. This is a process they had to manually do, and there’s a process that the exchanges all had to mainly do, which was the bulk of the supply. Just like having to do the customer service part of that, people are still emailing Ryan, didn’t someone email you today?
Ryan: Yep.
Mike: They were on uniswap or something. They’re trickling in slowly, people that maybe set it and forget it and forgot they had the TRB tokens and now they’re like remembering it and we’re taking care of them, but for the next, pretty much the whole leading into Q2, it was like all hands-on deck about getting these exchanges to migrate all their supply over. Getting Binance was a big deal, because they had a huge chunk you know, you felt much, we felt really good once 80% of the supply in now on the new TRB token. People can trade it; people can buy and sell it again. We’re like okay now, we just got to deal with some of these individuals, these people on uniswap and all that other stuff and slowly we dug out of the shadow of all that, but it took months and we’re still doing it. Now we look almost, I don’t want to say we forgot it, but we, like I said, we established, we learned a lot, we did a quick job of capturing that knowledge, that new learned knowledge and implementing new process changes and then we just said we got to put it behind us and we got to focus on everything we set out to do in 2021. Was get users, and start working on Tellor X and so I think that leads us into Liquity. Ryan, this was one of the first users that, this was the first user, but this was, you were involved in this process early on.
Ryan: Yeah, I just want to say like, I think that our response was a big takeaway for me, just the fact that it was such a big thing that happened for the protocol itself, and just how the dev team responded. Shout-out to JG and Krassi for going through that with us. And the community too for being so patient with us and having that kind of trust that we were going to be able to get out of that and then having even Liquity. Liquity was in the process of implementing us during this time and they had the full faith that we’d be able to make sure that everything was going to be fine. There was really no issue during that process of getting us implemented and then having them launch with us was like a huge coming out of that dust storm. We’re still here and everything’s moving forward and here’s an actual user announcement to show for it.
Mike: That was, it was huge to put it behind you by having a very tangible demonstration, that everything’s okay and there’s not a better way to do that than to have somebody outside of Tellor come in, tryst us enough to implement us and the type actually Liquity is, an immutable, very immutable project, so they really needed to vet their choice for their fallback oracle, and they, so that we had been talking with them since December of 2020, and then they launched in April with us. Yeah, they launched in April with us as their fallback oracle at the end of April, so you can see like how long sometimes these processes can be. Ample is way longer and we’ll talk about that, but it was huge to be able to... It was one of the first thoughts we had too, like are we going to lose Liquity because we were like this close to our first user and we’re like, they might get turned off by this whole process, but they weren’t, they saw exactly, they knew I think, that they might be just around the corner for something, they might be going through a similar even themselves right, because they were really worried when they were going to launch this immutable contract of liquidity, that it could all just break and then you have to fork it. So, they were sensitive to that and they were super gracious and understanding and they were curious and we explained them what happened. They totally got it, they’re like this is really cool, congrats on rising again. Ultimately, they were still very happy with what we did and how it was going to work for them and that was it. They launched; we didn’t know what was going to become of them, but I think that we’re really proud of them for not fizzling away. They’re, we’re very really happy that we’re a part of their protocol.
Ryan: I think, also in general, in this ecosystem a lot of people are looking for that kind of battle tested events, because you can say you know your code is indestructible and very secure and all that, but it’s not until you go through moments like that, where it’s just the moloch of crypto and code kind of coming together in perfect storm seeing how you come out of those things. I think a huge testament to the overall perception of your project.
Mike: I know we’ve sort of taken up a lot of time talking about that event, but at this point in 2021, it was a total shift and sort of became like a refreshing part of the year, where we had our first user now, we can move on to all the things that we finally wanted to get working on. At the end of 2020, we said like we envision it’s going to be a multi-chain ecosystem going forward, so we’re going to adapt to that and so we’re going to be looking into, excuse me, layer two solutions, getting on Polygon, Binance smart chain and all this other stuff that we were looking at the time. Binance smart chain was like the new thing at the time, and obviously Polygon was establishing itself really early and we had a relationship with them, but anyway, so we worked on something called the fellowship. Which is kind of like. It’s a layer two solution that’s kind of like a stop gap solution. It’s a bit of a centralized version of Tellor, that allows us to service projects over on Polygon as we, it’s kind of like a beta, almost in a way, that as we figure out a better, more decentralized way to sort of handle those things, and which is ultimately sort of like a jump way ahead is, what eventually led us to Tellor Flex is what we’re working on now, but you have to start somewhere and we were tinkering around with some ideas and the fellowship was one structure that we experimented with. We learned a lot for layer two stuff and so around this time we really started to get busy with developing that and getting a couple users to test that out and you know, I’ll just sort of leave that part there, because that story is yet to be written when it comes to really achieving that. We’re still working on Tellor Flex.
I think we could start to talk about the hackathons that we started to do at this point as well, we of course continued. I think our strategy in 2020 was to sponsor these hackathons, we continued that. Eth Denver, we did one with Eth global scaling Ethereum and hack, actually used two of them in this quarter. Scaling Ethereum and hack money and those have always been, I mean, there’s really not much to say about them, they’re kind of this bread-and-butter thing that we do and we try to do one a month if they are like a couple a quarter or something like that. Depending on what’s out there and we’re going to continue to do that in 2022. Probably just in a bigger way. Around this time, we started to do, we did a partnership, or sponsorship with a company called mouse belt, that did the re-imagine campaign with us or for themselves that we were sponsoring. And that was I think a really great success as well. I don’t know, what you think Ryan, or anybody else? Who remembers these? But we did a number of panels and I think what I liked about, what I’ll say about the re-imagine stuff. I didn’t really like the interviews that we did, that was just like the early stuff we did, with re-imagine was like an interview with Brenda, or an interview with Nick or whatever and those are great, but what I really liked was when we got a chance to host our own panel in a way or be on a panel that we sort of helped organize. Was that, we got a chance to go out to peers in the space and offer them a chance to be on a panel that we arrange, that is good, this is something that’s like you know everybody wants to do this, they want to have the marketing opportunities to share about their project and they want to get out there and establish thought leadership and all that stuff with us and it was just nice to be able to go out there and say hey to the CEO of Liquity and to the CEO of AmpleForth and into whoever else we had on. I forget, but, and say “hey, would you join us on a panel?”, and I just remember feeling like it was just nice to be able to do that. Especially with Liquity who just partnered with us, kind of, we’re offering them a little bit of a bonus that they’re, you know, trusted us, we’re going to hook them up with some stuff and then also with AmpleForth, we were still really in the middle fledgling stage of the integration. It was nice to be able to offer them the opportunity as well. If you have a different take on that stuff Ryan.
Ryan: I think it allowed us to kind of explore the, go beyond the limits, that we feel like, just typical marketing does. Was a great resource for kind of, doing things out of the box, or outside the box in terms of how they were, how we were marketing ourselves and also being a good resource for their, like the graphics and stuff that we didn’t have an in-house motion graphics department, so they were just really good outlets for that and then also like you said, that the discussion panel I think, that’s kind of our bread-and-butter, being able to have those thoughtful discussions and not only doing it like to ourselves, and echo chamber. To do it with other thought leaders in the space. I thought was a really nice touch in allowing us to kind of get the name out there but not do it in that two-dimensional, we are Tellor, listen to us, talk about ourselves kind of...
Mike: I think this is when we started to expand the team a little bit more as well, around this time early summer, spring, we brought Spuddy on. Who's not here, but you guys all know him. We sort of drug him out of the community, out of the miner channel on telegram and offered him a more official role and he’s grown quite a bit. And as well speaking of growing quite a bit, our resident giant Tally, the Tellor intern became no longer the intern and switched to a full-time dev role for us around this time. And then we also, Tim, I think this is around when you join. I think you’re on this call. I was going to ask you.
Tim: I joined around April, I think.
Mike: Yeah, because you were still finishing up with RaidGuild.
Tim: Yeah, I did a couple months of part-time and then sometime in the summer switched over to full time.
Mike: Yeah, it feels like a million years.
Tim: But I’ve worked like a little less than a year. That was so long ago. A lot has happened since I started.
Mike: Crypto time is like, it’s like dog years. So much is condensed in such a short period of time. It’s actually, uh, look, it’s 12:35 right now, and we’re still just getting started on Q3, I’m like what the heck. I was like, oh this will be a 30-minute call, I’m like man, there’s just so much that pops up and we’re, this is just the cliff notes for you guys, but so moving on to Q3. Ryan, what was the big theme of Q3?
Ryan: I think it was, buckling down with Tellor X, getting that sent off for audit and then also Eth CC was a huge event for us. I mean, I think it was my first in-person event outside of Miami Bitcoin, which wasn’t really.
Mike: Oh yeah, we should have given a whole paragraph to, no, I’m just kidding.
Ryan: It was great to be in real life event, also being with some of the Tellor team. We had a really good bonding experience and just being out there together was really awesome and also being in the company of just the crème-de-la-crème of the Ethereum community was really intriguing.
Mike: We also, at the end of Q3 I think, we removed the admin key again, which we had to put back in. Which we chose to put back in for the initial period right after the fork and the migration because we, it was just such an unknown. We had removed it prior in October of 2020, we removed it, and it was great, but you know, we decided to have that safety blanket in for a couple months as we sort of settled with everything and then once we felt comfortable again, and this did happen in August, we removed the admin key again and started to go back to that DAO like structure we were moving towards. So, that was a huge deal to us, it felt wrong to have the admin key in our pocket, because you can’t, if you have an admin key, how much can you really say you’re the most decentralized oracle out there? You just can’t. When you need them, boy, there are valuable, you appreciate having one, when you have one, because it gives you some levers to pull and you know, but ultimately not the goal here. It’s so you guys can be, the community, everybody’s pulling all the levers, not us and I think we’re well on our way. We also added more people here, Lauren, Josh, Owen, Sean. You started around Q3 at some point, June, I think it was. So, yeah, we had like a huge influx of new blood, Mike Bapst as well. In the Q3. We just expanded massively, that’s a lot of new blood to have join a team. That cannot always go well. That could change the culture of the team or things could not work out. It could be just a headache in terms of management you know. Going from a team of three people that are, they’re just individually managing themselves to now you have, it’s not like you just have Tally and Ryan that are also just doing their business you know. Now you have, you’re running meetings daily and you’re checking in with people and there’s like 5-6 people to keep track of and to just support you know. This is not something that the founders... Brenda had, she’s the only person really on the team that had a ton of experience with management and having people work under her, so she’s great at it, but Nick and I were like a big learning experience for us. It was great to see. We going into Q4, and sort of we’re coming into the runway here, the final stretch here. We decided that we wanted to hold a Tellor week, because we knew that this team had grown really big and we liked everybody initially of course and we were like well, maybe the thing we could do is ride out the gate, we could invite them all in person and we could do a bonding week. It was really more like three days but we called it Tellor week. And we had everybody come to our office in Maryland, and stay in the area and work from the office for three days, and we had dinners and some activities planned and we played some games in the office. Would you guys say it felt like an actual work day for those three days? That was the intention. Let’s actually get work done. I don’t know what your experience was, but anyway. Does anybody want to share about how you know, thinking back to total week, and what it was like?
Owen: It was great to just meet everyone in person you know, because after that point it was all over you know, discord, telegram, zoom.
Sean: Yeah, definitely just awesome to see people and get work done. I mean, we were all in the office together, which was cool.
Ryan: There’s those intangibles that you don’t really get through discord and zoom and I think, I felt like I got a lot of those with the people that I was only getting zoom and discord from. I mean, Mike, I’ve been to the office a couple times before that, but with you guys it was fine, but you know, Sean, Owen, Lauren, so you guys are brand new, so I barely interacted with you much at all before that, so it was a really good time and really productive.
Mike: It’s kind of bittersweet, because it was just like, man, I wish we could do this more often, having everybody there and doing presentations where everybody could be in sync and aligned on things. Something that is, we’re good at doing it virtually, but you just can’t recreate it in discord, but anyway, it was a blast. You guys were awesome and I totally agree, it was just cool to meet some of you guys in person and it was cool to see you guys bond like we were trying to also allow you guys to form your own little friendships and teams and things as well and that’s more important I think for us than it was like, can we establish a better relationship with you guys, because we have to be a little bit separate in some way. I don’t know, maybe I’m making that up. Let’s see here. I think the big thing, the next big thing was the AmpleForth, I mean that was such a huge thing, it’s hard to think of it as a Q4 thing of 2021. We finally got AmpleForth over the line as another user. And that was like two years in the making. But we finally did it. They could say they finally did it, but it was like a huge effort on our part as well, because we, this is recent news, so we don’t have to super rehash it, but we had to really go into their community and sort of win them over and do a lot of communication over there and we had zoom calls with people. We had a ton of back and forth in the discord and it was, we had been doing a little bit of that as well along the way, but it was always, it was never met like very critically for a long time. I was really proud of, I’m just going to call out Spuddy and MikeSr, you guys were, I feel like very active early on in that discord and we’re like feeling the brunt of it, but we all sort of did a good job and yeah. So, they finally got to the point where they were ready for their first decentralized proposal, governance proposal thing, we were the first proposal in their new governance format and it ultimately passed. It was a long time coming, like I said, but it was great. We love those guys, we love their community, they’re a great project, they have the same ethos as we do and unlike Liquity, not Liquity the project, but Liquity the integration with Tellor. The difference for us in this case was, with Liquity we love being a fallback oracle, we think we’re a great case for fallbacks and I think when the rubber meets the road, the fact that you have to rely on Tellor to swoop in and save the day is a great thing to be proud of, but it was cool to see Tellor be on a much more even playing field with ChainLink in this case, because... So, Liquity uses ChainLink and then backs up to Tellor. AmpleForth uses, was using an average of centralized oracle and ChainLink and AmpleForth oracle and then Tellor came in and it was a median, so we were all in equal footing with ChainLink for the first time in a user’s mind. In the user integration perspective and we were, that’s why that was a really big deal for us. What else happened in the end of Q4?
Ryan: You launched Tellor X.
Mike: Yeah. Obviously, this whole time behind the scenes of all this stuff is, the devs were really focused on Tellor X. Tim, I don’t know, because since you’re a huge part of that, I don’t know if you want to give, like without going on and on, well do what you want, but is there anything you want to say about the whole Tellor X development? Like summarize what you know, looking back on it, if you can summarize. Do you want to take a shot?
Tim: Yeah, trying to think.
Mike: It’s not easy.
Tim: I want to remember the timeline briefly. It was really cool to see the whole thing from start to finish. When I started off with the weekly whiteboards, we did for a couple of weeks breaking it down into its different components, and then Nick cranked out a lot of the code and then a couple of us took it from there and tested it and iterated and added things and then there were even a good number of decent sized changes from what it looked like at the whiteboard stage. Different ideas we had it as the thing developed and we added on different things like the query data for example. And then that was, seemed like it was months of testing, and more testing.
Mike: At some point it was like. It’s like we had to decide, we could stay tinkering with it for a while, you can test and test and test, but eventually you have to say like okay, I think this is ready, like let’s move to the next stage. Let’s get this thing ready to launch. It was, we got to launch this year, we never give out deadlines or whatever or have a road-map, but it was a big goal of ours to make sure it was deployed in Q4. As early as possible in Q4.
Tim: Yeah, that’s a good point. There’s always, as you’re going along, you just always can think of new things that can be improved upon, things that you didn’t think about before, we had plenty of suggestions from the community, a lot of which are integrated into Tellor X now, but and then we’re like developing Tellor Flex. We’re already adding things that we thought of later to add to Tellor X, but you can just always keep improving things, but eventually you got to push something out, something that’s well tested and that works. You can’t just keep waiting to get that final perfect product. I guess that is a good, it’s been nice working on Tellor Flex now. Like being able to add those things that, those extra things that are even more improvements. We’re always just iterating on things and adding.
Mike: That’s one thing I could say, that we’ve been really consistent with, is just that general notion whether it’s development or pretty much anything we do, just thinking about the Tellor values call last week. Was it last week? Whatever. We did that. One of the things that is the value of ours is just like this iterative mentality and this, like, get it out, get it out in the world as soon as possible. And not just stay in research more for too long. Just we want to be fast and flexible and I think that it’s exactly what we did. Even though Tellor X did have a longer development timeline than we typically have, but that was because so much other stuff was going on as well and we were growing as a team and so that slows things down a little bit too. But for a greater cause of training everybody and giving everybody opportunity to learn and participate. But yeah, Tellor X launched and we’ve been working with other things that we did in Q4, where we switched the community over to discord and we try to decentralize the community in a way by creating a, having a better home for us so we could have better conversations, more robust conversations and more organization around that. And also, to be more transparent and have you guys been able to interact with us a lot clearer and more readily and all the good stuff that discord provides as opposed to telegram, which is a much more private thing and just chaotic. And we’ve seen so much growth in this quarter, just from that one decision alone, I think was one of the biggest things we did last year. I think, I know it sounds, it might not occur to you as big as an integration or whatever and obviously it’s not, but I think it’s going to, it’s already paying huge dividends and we’ve had like several users come in and hop in our discord and we’re working with these people to integrate with us. We’re hoping to hit 2022 very strongly on the user front. Just a brief, one thing that we can’t look too far ahead into the future because of, just because of the way things are and the way that we are without looking too far ahead. But we are very excited about, our, the outlook for more user integrations, now that we got the two biggest ones off our plates and this greater sense of maturity, around who we are as a team, as a community, as an oracle. We’re really excited about the first part of 2022, we’re excited about Eth Denver again, just to sort of, now we’ll finally get to do it right. We’re going to be sending out a large part of the team and we’re just really excited for that. We’re obviously working on Tellor Flex, like Tim was hinting at the next version of Tellor, some additional improvements, and we’re going to continue to just not stop making Tellor better. And as we learn from new users and as we adjust to the nature of the space, Tellor Flex really represents the fact that layer twos are starting to mature and users are starting to come over there. We used to always say that layer twos are more of a just an announcement thing, there’s no users over there, there’s no demand, we always said that, and that’s like changing. So, we have to adapt as well, so that 22 is going to be about being flexible, and adaptable, something that we’ve trained ourselves and we feel like we’re, if we’re experts in anything, we’re experts in being flexible. Anything else do we want to add on the official review? Ryan? Did we miss anything? Anybody else want to add anything on the call? I know that I kind of just bulldozed at the end there, but I was just looking at the time and I was just rambling too long. Yeah, that was it, thanks for listening to review, I think we have some questions, you want to run through Ryan. If you don’t mind before you get started, I’m going to switch to my phone, I have to switch to my phone. So, there might be a... I’m not going to leave, because I don’t want to turn this thing off. I made you host, so if I leave it’s going to be okay, but I’m going to be just, I’ll be careful.
Question1: Are you guys in developing products focus on the usability of the TRB token, like a TRB pay, something focused on currency usage? Thanks, hear emoji.
Ryan: I think, essentially, I think this is trying to get some more usage out of the token, where just to iterate, here the token has utility, I think we’re just seeing because our usership base isn’t as large as we’d like to be, the utility isn’t really being on the forefront, but as we see this ecosystem grow, we’re going to see the utility that’s already built into the protocol become more and more used. We want to keep it that way, it’s not, we don’t want to add different functions of the token, that don’t really have anything to do with the oracle itself, because that just becomes noisy in a distraction, so we’ll see that the velocity of the usage of the TRB token increase more with the more usage of Tellor. I don’t know if anybody wants to add to that any other comments. And there we go.
Question2: What is the timeline for implementing flashbots? Currently front-runners are making reporting impossible.
Ryan: I don’t know, Owen, do you have any insight on that? That you can share with us?
Owen: I do, I do. So, you can use flashbots right now, however, it’s going to require a bit more setup than regular reporting, just because the branch I’m working on on GitHub, our version control for all our code, is still under development, I mean I just got it working successfully, like not too long ago, I’ve submitted a few times with the flashbots, but there’s still just some weird setup, like for example you have to submit, you don’t submit transactions, you submit a bundle of transactions, with flashbots and so there will be some more, just in general, there’s going to be some more info on this. I encourage everyone to join the Telliot call tomorrow, we can go over a lot of these issues and more depth and whatnot. What things that I’ve run into, but one thing is, you also need to make a new account, it doesn’t have to hold any funds or anything, but they use flashbots relay, the flashbots organization has this relay, this endpoint that you’re using to submit your bundles of transactions that essentially go straight to the miners. They skip the public mempool, right. And so, you need this other account that is used as it’s a signatory account and they use it to establish your reputation with their flashbots relay and what’s annoying about that is, everyone what I’ve noticed is, it started out when I was testing things out with this, there was a few people using flashbots and whatnot, but now it seems like almost every transaction there’s people using flashbots and there’s a few of these addresses where you know, I’m just guessing that their reputation is pretty high, so even if you get to the point of like, okay, I’m ready to submit with flashbots, a lot of times your bundle won’t be mined and I’m guessing I don’t concretely know yet, but I’m guessing it’s because they have a much higher reputation with the flashbots relay. This is just like an issue that I don’t, it’s undetermined yet for me, whether it is a good thing or not, because it’s, I don’t know how to get more feedback from flashbots relay, and okay, how do I increase my reputation without losing a bunch of money, because right now it’s basically, I’ve had to submit transactions where I lose money, just to establish a reputation and then I can start submitting. Still, like a lot of times you know, you’re submitting and someone beats you, with a lower base fee and a lower tip. It seems like which is frustrating, but the good thing about this is that you don’t lose money for transactions that don’t go through. I will post in the link here in the zoom chat, this is a link to the branch or the pull request and there’s some instruction on how to set this up if you want to. If you’re feeling a little risky but it’s going to require some more, you’re going to have to know how to switch, know clone a repository from GitHub, switch to a branch. You’re going to need to activate a virtual environment, install some dependencies, and then there’s some new commands and right now the reason that this whole flashbot thing is not in a new release among other reasons is; it breaks the past reporting command. You can’t use the legacy transaction type where it’s just using gas price, it’s using the new type 2 Ethereum transactions, from theory Ethereum improvement proposal like 1559, where you’re using like a max priority fee for gas and max fee for gas. Just hit me up in discord oraclown, if you run into issues if you trying to set this up. I’m just kind of, hesitant to say go for it, because I’ve had to submit these negative transactions to establish a reputation, so losing like 100-200 bucks and then reporting for I mean, at least for me, I’ve been reporting for like 10, around 10-15 bucks, so then it takes a few times, like a couple of days to even break even realistically. But yeah, go for it. Let me know in discord if you run into any issues and I’m currently working on this, so I don’t really know when the rest of the team is getting back to you. I need some more people to test this out before we release this, officially anyway. I have another reporter that I’m testing it on, unsuccessfully so far, so anyway, but yeah, that’s it.
Ryan: Thanks Owen, I’ll put the link and I’ll put a disclaimer on there, that it’s still being tested, but the fact that people can, if they want to mess around with them, it’ll be nice and then also what time is that call tomorrow?
Owen: Let me look at my calendar. 11AM Eastern time I believe.
Ryan: Cool. So, yes, if you’re interested in being part of that discussion, join that call tomorrow.
Owen: If you’re just a reporter in general, please join, because we’re going to go over more than just the flashbot stuff.
Question3: Are you able to run a tutorial on how pyTelliot is built? Almost like an introductory Tellor university course?
Ryan: Now, I was actually, the first time I read this, I thought it was like, they want to see like a documentary on how you guys built pyTelliot, but I think it’s more just how to become a reporter. Which we have some documentation going, floating around, but I think it might be useful to have a more, kind of concise, especially with all the updates that have happened. I think we could probably brush up on what’s available out there, maybe even just do an official Tellor school video. I don’t know. If you have any thoughts on that Owen?
Owen: Yeah, we don’t. I thought we had something for setting up reporting, but if they are actually interested in how, it’s built and stuff, we can do a code walkthrough of pyTelliot core and tele feed examples to show the main repositories.
Ryan: Maybe we can discuss doing like kind of high-level tech call on it. I think. Thinking for myself, I might do an updated Tellor school video for sure. Regardless, great question. We’ll definitely need to touch on just the available resources on that.
Question4: I’m going to break it up with; what you all get for Christmas? Anybody got any notable gifts? If you celebrate Christmas, or Hannukah gifts, or any other holiday gifts really? Anything worth nothing on a community call that’s going to be out in public on youtube?
Owen: Yeah, I got an amazing reindeer hat from the secret Santa. Someone from the team.
Mike: You’re welcome. Yeah, we did a secret Santa with the whole team, which was a cool little thing to do. We haven’t really talked about it much. Tally was my secret Santa. Well, I don’t know if it’s secret until it’s over, right. Tally was my secret Santa and I thanked him for he got me a big recipe book for grilling with a pellet grill and I have a pellet grill, for anybody who knows what that is. It’s pretty comprehensive recipe book, it’s got everything. So, that was cool for me. I’ll just add that. Go ahead.
Ryan: Nick was mine, but I just haven’t gotten it yet.
Mike: That’s fine, you’ll get a... Sometimes a really late Christmas gift, it’s fun because it keeps the spirit alive.
Ryan: Nick is the great.
Mike: I was just going to say, like for me this year was fun to, and this sounds so corny, but to give gifts was fun and I’m particularly like, to my son. Was finally like, he’s two and a half, 2 and 8 months or whatever, but this is his first Christmas where he kind of understood what the hell Christmas was and excited for. Yeah, that’s how he talks. He says what the hell is Christmas dad? No, I’m just kidding, so that was fun for me. It was like getting him the things he wanted, two airplanes, that kind of stuff.
Ryan: Alright, enough of the fun, got some real heavy hitter questions going on here.
Question5: Shouldn’t all liquidity pools and aggregators require a service similar to Tellor’s in order to accurately lock away tokens and pay out fees in the selected currencies? What do you think their appetite is for using Tellor over a centralized data feed? Anybody have an urge to answer this one? I have my own take on it but I’m curious.
Will: Yeah, they should. Whether or not they know, they should be using something that’s decentralized versus something that’s not. It might be a matter of convenience or what they know. There’s the sense of how much education is needed in the space for them to know that you know, their project is at risk if they’re not using a decentralized oracle, or truly decentralized oracle. But then there’s also probably a sense of maybe a bit of complacency too. To say the existing solutions are okay. They check a box and they don’t see it as a potential for risk, but I mean, time will tell if that pays out or not. The Titanic didn’t have enough lifeboats you know, and then hit the iceberg and it was a terrible disaster and now we have enough lifeboats for everybody that’s on board a boat or a ship, whatever. I guess that’s kind of the risk that projects who are not using it, run into or could potentially face.
Ryan: Titanic, the unsinkable ship.
Mike: It was getting really morbid, dark. Merry Christmas.
Ryan: I was just going to say I think that there’s a big narrative, gray area that I think Tellor has been just dealing with since day one, which is, what does decentralization mean. Is it centralized enough and I think the appetite is there, it’s just a matter of what constitutes decentralization and you know, the big oracles right now, Uniswap and ChainLink, the general narrative right now is that they are good enough. It’s just a matter of changing that narrative continuing to highlight the actual, you know, decentralized definitions. And I mean, they are great oracles, they’ve been doing exactly what they have set out to do, but just to that point of what is the appetite there for Tellor? The general discussion right now just isn’t really having, hasn’t been had to get down to the nitty-gritty of how Tellor differentiates from those two oracles. So, the focus of 2022 is just kind of really opening up that discussion. I don’t know if you guys have listened, but that Chris Black had a really awesome discussion with Colton from Liquity about just the oracle problem in general and how it’s being addressed and how people are kind of painting over their oracle setups in terms of calling it decentralized. If you haven’t listened, go check that out.
Question6: I wish Tally was here, but what’s Tally’s favorite color? Does anybody have any guesses?
Owen: Green. What’s that X for our logo?
Ryan: We’re speaking for Tally, and it’s green. So, whatever password you’re trying to hack, try that one.
Question7: When aggressive marketing?
Sean: I think we’re getting pretty aggressive, come the new year.
Owen: Buy TRB now or else...
Sean: We have things coming, like new content, new events, new sponsorships, things like that. We’re pretty excited about it. Should do some work.
Ryan: That’s it for he questions. Any final words?
Mike: Here’s to a great 2022 everyone and thanks for everybody that was around 21. Happy new year!
Ryan: Happy new year everybody! Adios.
