Links
Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LExDvBqTpAk&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
This call reminded everyone about the progress of integrating Tellor into AmpleForth. Looking good, should be reporting data to the Ample project starting next Monday afternoon. A couple of other smaller information was shared, mostly about the Tellor X status, which is being tested, namely the governance part right now. Also, Mike mentioned the progress on marketing and biz-dev. Special attention was brought to the fact that more and more projects are reaching out to Tellor about a possible integration, which is amazing news. After answering some community questions, Mike Sr. walked through (py)Telliot, and the challenges that are still present. Anyone interested can reach out to participate in the shaping of Telliot.
Whole discussion
Nick: Hey everyone, welcome to Tellor community call. November 16th 2021. Things are going really great. If you guys saw the big news, obviously the AmpleForth main-net vote officially has been kicked off. It goes live tomorrow, so that the delay period for kicking it off ends tomorrow at 2PM I believe, Eastern time. Then there’s a three-day vote and then there’s a two-day challenge period. Basically, if you can, you can actually look at who’s allowed to vote, because you have to delegate your tokens to vote. You can delegate them to yourself but right now there’s basically two wallets that have the vast majority of the delegation and they both support the Tellor vote. Not speaking it was a unanimous snapshot vote, so there’s almost no way it doesn’t go through. It would be a really big deal, but that means Monday give or take a few out, Monday afternoon sometime, likely going to be an AmpleForth oracle. So, we’ll be doing our best to push values on chain and it’ll be exciting.
Brenda: If they have Forth even though it’s probably going to go through, go vote.
Nick: No, you don’t need to vote I think, it’s weird because I was talking with Brandon, so their CEO, about it and it’s weird because you have the same problem that we have; where you have to pay a whole lot in gas to go vote.
Brenda: Okay.
Mike: So, delegate.
Nick: Yeah, so save your money. Since that’s kind of why you do the snapshot beforehand or at least that’s why we did the snapshot vote, it was unanimous that Tellor’s going to be an oracle, we’ll just push through...
Brenda: Save gas.
Nick: Yeah, the two big guys can vote with five percent of the total supply and then everybody else just save your gas because it doesn’t matter. Anyway, but the bigger thing you can do is go tweet it out, go spread the news. Super exciting, Ample will be our biggest project using Tellor which is awesome. Some other things just an update on Tellor X... Tellor X is looking great, the Rinkeby vote ends this Thrusday, should be updated on Friday. We’re already testing on Rinkeby, we have some contracts up there but we’re just doing the actual governance process so we can test that piece out as well. And that’ll be the last thing we actually need to test before we can go live, so probably, I think a week we’re planning on kicking off the main-net vote in a week, which seems like super close, which it is. So, we’ll kick off the main-net vote in a week, we’ll be doing the deployments, probably this Friday a main-net, Friday or Saturday, depending on how gas prices look and then, you guys can go audit that one. We’ll verify them, it’s going to be the stuff that’s being proposed on Rinkeby. The vote will be a week long and then there’ll be a one-day challenge period and then it’ll go live. Looking like I did December 1st still, give or take a day for gas prices and things actually go through. But it’s looking good and we’re super excited about it. Last thing’s on the technical side. If you guys have seen some people have been coming to our integrations channel, we’ve also been getting people to reach out to us kind of directly, which is just amazing, keep it up. We’re obviously doing something right on the biz dev side or on the technical side. Something that people are starting to notice us and they’re starting to come to us a lot of other chains want Tellor over there. A lot of projects on other chains and we’re going to talk probably after Tellor X is launched, about what that’s going to look like, but we have a lot of people who are trying to integrate Tellor and if you notice, this is kind of the staff here on this call, we’re not a gigantic team, like Maker, ChainLink, we have like 12 people. So, whenever somebody wants to do an integration, we always like to try and hop on calls with them and try and walk them through it and hand-hold them and make it a white glove process, but we’re just kind of short-staffed. If you guys want to help out with that, let me know. If there’s anyone in the community who wants to help users integrate Tellor or would want to learn how to do that definitely just reach out, because we’re hoping that we’ll reach our point. That’s a good position to be in and we want to train you guys to do it. I know a lot of you guys are already responding to the discord messages pointing them in the right direction and definitely keep that up, but if you guys want to learn more, get deeper, want to go deploy Tellor on other chains, let me know. So, Mike, anything on your end guys?
Mike: I just wanted to continue off what you’re saying and a part of what we want to do is make it so we have really great documentation for Tellor X and really great explainer videos, and things like that. Just to sort of get a potential customer from the very very beginning all the way to integration. That way you know eventually when we are much more of a DAO than we are currently, it will be the community that is doing a lot of these things and you guys are going to need materials to do that. Speaking of that, you guys have been calling for more infographic style stuff. We’ve begun working on a video, the first of probably at least a couple of these videos, because you can’t make one perfect video that tackles everything. We’re going to have a really nice animated explainer video about how Tellor works that we’re excited about and it’ll be really shareable for you guys. It of course will be on the website so most people will see it when they first hear about Tellor, but it’ll give you guys over on reddit something to share. We’re going to do more of that. Thanks for hounding us about it, it’s always been something important to us, but now we’re at the level where we can actually get that stuff made and we have the budget for it and all that stuff. Keep an eye out for that. Tomorrow starts, there’s a mouse belt or the Reimagine guys, they are doing a three-day event starting tomorrow on NFTs and DAOs and the whole sort of Bitcoin and El Salvador things. A bit big topic for that three-day event. We’re sponsoring the event so if any of that content is interesting to you guys, tune in. Keep an eye out for some Tellor content around those interviews and the content they put out. Other than that, we are still chugging along on our side of the Tellor X stuff, the website, the branding, the sort of marketing push that we’re going to do around Ample and around Tellor X launch. We’re excited. Also, we brought on a new member of the team. He’s not going to be able to make it on one of these calls for another couple weeks due to a prior conflict that still needs to run its course, so we’ll do like a proper introduction sometime probably in December, but his name is Will. He’s really brilliant UI/UX guy. A really great all-arounder on the sort of design side of things as well, super nice guy, and he has long history with us, he’s been around for, like a friend of Tellor since before Tellor. So, he helped us in Daxia days. Anyway, I’ll save the rest of that for his own introduction. I think that’s it, I’m ready for some questions from you guys.
Nick: We’re going to do questions or py(Telliot) first?
Ryan: Well, we don’t really have a lot of questions, let’s just knock them out and then we can go into the pyTelliot. Octavian, I saw you raise your hand, I just want to give you an opportunity, since you’re on the call here. Did you have a question or you just wanted to say hey? Fair enough. There are also some other new names I’m seeing on this call, was there any questions that you guys had? I’ll open the floor there.
Nick: I see Tamsay is pointing in the chat too. And Tamsay, man, you’ve been awesome lately, you’ve been making some cool infographs, and just weird things, keep it up.
Ryan: Absolutely. Alright, then we can just go into the, we just had a couple questions. First one was Tellor X hoodies. I told you Nick they want the hoodies.
Nick: Coming up on that winter season.
Mike: We talked about, and I think you know we’re actually running low on stock. I know I need to send a couple shirts to Ireland and I don’t think we have the sizes left so I think we need to do another re-stock anyway. If we’re going to do another order, might as well do some hoodies. If you want a hoodie, claim it now and that way we can make to order them or what I mean if we know like 10 people out there ask for them, we’ll buy 20 or something.
Nick: Are these going to be zipper hoodies?
Ryan: Owen is not a fan.
Owen: No way.
Mike: I have both. I don’t have a horse in that race.
Ryan: Says ask the one guy wearing a zipper jacket. Alright, there’s just one other question: What will be the next updates after Tellor X?
Nick: I think the biggest thing is going to be focusing on, we’re going to be trying to just almost make a generic structure for Tellor, to get Tellor on other chains really fast. It’s going to look and feel a whole lot like Tellor X, but it’s going to be for other chains, so that’s coming next probably. A few weeks after Tellor X.
Ryan: Cool, that’s it.
Nick: Now, without waiting anymore, the pyTelliot guys are going to go over basically. For those of you who don’t know the history, there’s reporting software, you know, who is running the previous miners and it’s gone through some weird life cycles. In its past, we had, originally it was like a little python script that I wrote, and then it got to be a better python script and then myself and Mike Kuhn originally, we built the first go-lane clients which was like 100x improvement in mining speed and then we had Evan come in and he helps build GPU miner and that was crazy powerful for all about a month until a bunch of people made FPGAs and then it turned the miner in golang. It’s sort of built out to handle all these upgrades and it became, this really big gigantic repo that almost nobody knew what was in there. It was poorly tested and you know now it’s, it sort of works for what currently works, but for the new broad structure of Tellor X we decided that it’s best just to kind of sunset that one and re-write it in something that actually makes sense and so we deemed it pyTelliot. Now it’s just going to be like Telliot from probably once Tellor X launches and I’ll let these guys talk about it. Don’t know who’s talking first, but over to you guys.
MikeS: Alright, if you can enable some screen-sharing I’ll get started.
Ryan: On it. Try now.
MikeS: Alright, here we go. How’s that. Can everybody see a screen that says pyTelliot? Great, great. Okay, so I am Tellor’s resident old man here working with Owen and Telly on the next version of Telliot. So, what is Telliot? Is basically a python framework for interacting with the Tellor X network. We sort of took a scratch look at what Tellor X is and what can pyTelliot really be. So, hopefully by the end of this presentation you’ll have a good idea. So, what are the objectives? We have basically, we want to help users submit queries to the Tellor X oracle, to ask for data, ask for fresh data and look at historical data. Also, very important is to define new queries and query types, because if you know about Tellor actually, you know that can handle lots of different kinds of queries, beyond just numerical values and price feeds. So, we’ll help users do that, we want to be able to help reporters respond accurately to queries and also monitor the Tellor X network for opportunities to report and hopefully make money. Profitable opportunities there. And then of course maintain the security of the network by disputing, helping people dispute inaccurate responses, voting on other disputes as well as participating in governance.
So, why python? Basically, it’s the most, we want to make Telliot available to as many users as possible and python is really the most popular language. This is one survey that, or a study that IEEE puts out every year and pretty much across the board python tops the list of the most used languages. So, we hope that this is something that’s going to help people get involved and use and contribute more to Telliot. The current architecture of it consists of several components. They’re currently under development, the first one it the Telliot core. It’s the cool functionality, the feed, examples and then some future applications for both reporting and monitoring. The Telliot core itself basically is all the core functionality and the goal is to provide a sort of small framework, core framework which other programs can use to interact with the Tellor network. The idea is for this to be fairly stable, less changing, that other programmers can rely on. The next one is the Telliot Feed Examples and these are actually an initial suite of reporter data feeds that Tellor’s developing as examples and they’re of course built on top of the Telliot core. In the future we’re going to be creating, you know, rolling out more usable applications like a sort of end-to-end reporter application that can be used by reporters to submit query responses and even a plug-in framework so that experienced programmers can essentially put in their own algorithms for reporting. Also, a Telliot monitor to basically monitor and visualize the status of the Tellor network.
That’s the current vision and architecture. Going into a little more detail here. The Telliot core. What does it do? What features does it have? So, I broke it down here into six basic things and this aligns pretty close to, well very closely with what the Tellor core repository has in it here. One of the things is the queries module and what this does is it helps to define Tellor X queries. It’s basically implementation of the Tellor data specifications for interacting with a network and it could help people submit queries on chain in the right format and also interpret responses on chain in the proper format. We have a data sources module and what that does is... basically a data source is the abstraction that allows people to create responses to queries. You can fetch and store data and even run user-defined algorithms to computer response to a query so people that are responding to queries would generally implement a data source to go get the data for that query. Now the data feed itself is used by a reporter. Essentially what a data feed does is, it associates a data source and plugs it into a query so you can imagine anybody that’s reporting might have different data feeds or data sources or different data sources that they want to attach to a query. That allows them to do that, the reporter module is still a work in progress but basically it manages a data feed. Can help actually submit the query responses on chain, monitor the Tellor X network for opportunities, compute profitability, and make some basic decisions for whether or not a reporter should submit response to a query. Whether or not it’s profitable, whether or not we’re taking any other factor into the decision. It has a directory module which is basically a Tellor X phone book and that pretty simply has all the addresses of all the different types of Tellors contracts, on each chain and as well as the contract interfaces which are called APIs.
And finally, the contracts module is sort of a higher layer framework to interact with Tellor contracts to read and write them, and also to help programs listen and respond to things that happen on the Tellor network. So, that’s basically the Telliot core. So, a lot of good capability there that I think is ready to go, just a couple quick slides on the different aspects of it. The queries module. Again, it helps specify query types, implements the data specifications, a simple example here might be a coin spot price. Maybe you want to request that from the Tellor X network. So, we would define that query, and that query has parameters which in this case would be the symbol and probably the currency that you’d like the price in and we use something called a query descript descriptor which uniquely identifies this query and this is important how the Tellor X network operates. If you look on the bottom left here, you’ll see a string here, it’s the query type is a coin spot price, this is actually a special string and the idea is that it’s important to specify the query exactly so there’s no confusion. This is in a format that is readable by humans, by computers, that’s not specific to any particular programming language, that’s called a json string. So, that’s how we specify queries and this delete at core helps programmers do that. Like I said data sources basically is something which creates a query response and it fetches data from other places, so a data source can go fetch data from a web API, can go fetch it from a real live person through a UI, could go fetch it from another data source. Other cool thing is it can run an algorithm, it can do mean or median, or any imaginal algorithm on any number of data sources to create this query response. So, this is kind of a nice framework which allows a standardized mechanism. The whole idea again is that people can plug these things in and they can become part of a reporter application and also time stamps responses and stores of history in case those are needed for future computations. Value types are something that’s associated with an oracle query. Basically, what a value type does is, it helps reporters and other users of Tellor X speak the language of blockchain. So, these responses, they mean things to you and in the real world usually like prices, but they could also even more complicated data structures could even be the output of programs. We need to make sure that there’s a standardized way of representing this, these what can be complex query responses. Storing that on-chain, so build into pyTelliot is the ability to encode and decode data from the blockchain language into real world values.
Where are we at now? The Tellor core is available on as a standard python package in on pipe.org, version 0.0.2, we have documentation which is reasonably complete for that core. That in the future what are we going to do? We have to essentially want to work with users and customers to design new query types, to go fetch new kinds of data, put it on chain and then some more you know practical stuff we need to do in terms of improving the behavior of contract listeners. Programs can know what’s happening, what’s currently happening on the network as far as Tellor feeds go. We currently have reporters going for the legacy request IDs to support existing customers and that will be available soon on py as well for users to install and run and become actual reporters. That’s about all I have, that’s where we’re at. I definitely welcome anybody’s feedback, hop onto discord, hop onto GitHub, feel free to comment on the code pull requests, submit your own pull requests. Glad to have all the help we can get. That’ll do it.
Nick: Sorry I was muted. Where, I guess it’s obviously a python client, what kind of people are you looking for that could potentially help and where do you see the biggest need in over the next say a month or two and getting this thing up and running?
MikeS: That’s a good question. I think in terms of, I think the reporter algorithms and interacting with the blockchain, monitoring the status of the blockchain, that’s kind of the main thing that we have to get figured out, is to finish those, to get some basically key capabilities of the reporter into the Tellor core and to get more reporters up and running. I mean obviously anybody familiar with python as well as basic operation of the blockchain monitoring events, interacting with the blockchain. Anybody that can do those sorts of things is glad to have the help.
Nick: Yeah, cool.
MikeS: We definitely have a sort of object-oriented programming style which hopefully you know more than I guess versus a python scripted style. Everything’s sort of object-oriented, so that kind of experience would be great too.
Nick: I’m going to kick it over; Owen and Tally have both worked on it. Anything you guys specifically working on and where do you see some things that we can help out on your guys?
Tally: I guess I would just comment that it’s at the end of the day it’s open-source software, and it’s very flexible, not only in terms of the oracle’s flexibility but pyTelliot itself is very modular, very flexible, so I would imagine that, I would encourage if there are any developers who watch, maybe it’d be cool not only to think of how can I contribute, but also what interesting use cases can I make of the oracle through pyTelliot. Because, many things we may not have thought of yet.
Owen: Yeah, and part of the reason why the reporter logic and a lot of those example feeds have been moved out of the Telliot core is because we’re still kind of working out the how the plug-in architecture is going to work. So, if we have a new integration, like someone wants to create a new data feed and new reporter with a specific kind of scheduling, you know if you have experience with that, that’s also welcome. Your input whether it’s on discord or wherever, GitHub.
Nick: Yeah, and then I think, did you put the links in here to where the documentations are for the examples?
MikeS: Yep, if you go to the actually the GitHub repo, there’s also a link there as well, but I did, there’s a link down here on the bottom right.
Nick: Oh cool, yeah. The cool piece about Tellor X is like you can create data feeds and then people don’t necessarily have to be submitting for them, so we can create data feeds even if there isn’t a user yet. And one of the cool things that allows us to do actually is create, almost just give people ideas to what you can build on Tellor and probably over December and January we’re going to probably start giving out some bounties for people to create some examples. So, go put some interesting data on chain, and we’ll give you some bounties for it. If you guys want, you can go look at the examples currently, you can start thinking about some cool ideas and yeah, so anybody who even if on this call, if you guys have cool ideas, let me know and we can place bounties out for them and get people to start making these packages because we really want it to be super easy for people; “Hey I want this new coin price”. It’s super easy to figure out how to do that, I want this stock price, I want this information from some other chain, I want to ask this question. Tellor can do any of these things. We want to make it as straightforward and I think it’s just going to be one of those things where we got to do hundreds of prices and hundreds of different data requests before we really get that process down. So, starting to turn those out early is going to be important.
MikeS: I just want to add to that Nick, that one of the cool things is that with the core being separated out, the examples being separated out, if people want to create new queries or new data feeds, essentially, they can just create a new python project and incorporate these and use them and if you have a particular query you want to have answered you can create a python package for that just to incorporate everything else and publish that as well. Hopefully we’ll see a lot of new GitHub repos popping up using the Tellor core.
Nick: Yeah, I can envision it in the future being something kind of how the Graph works, people come on there and just create these new subgraphs and you do theoretically, you don’t need to reach out to the graph team to make these. Eventually, it should just be this thing where people come on and can create them and post them in repos and everyone sort of knows how they work and it does work so that’s what I’m excited about.
No, thank you guys very much, and then I have one last question Mike; did you purposefully make the line squiggly? What was the UX thinking here in this slide?
MikeS: That’s cool I thought.
Nick: Tellor octopus.
MikeS: That was the only thing, I wasn’t thrilled about was, it did look a little bit like a spider or an octopus.
Mike: I thought it looked like a spaghetti man, but you know, you might see an octopus.
MikeS: I see one of those electrical spheres with lightning rods, lightning bolts coming out of it.
Nick: This was super helpful on the architecture side and then I think maybe in, probably 3-4 weeks, once Tellor X is live, we’ll probably have you guys back and somebody can just walk us through. We’ll give you 100 tokens and you can deposit them and start running and reporting data which is going to be super cool. So, thanks. Anybody else have anything? No? Awesome. Thanks everyone for joining, feel free to reach out to us in discord and talk to you guys soon.
