Links
Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSYIHGUJD08&ab_channel=Tellor
Project website: www.tellor.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WeAreTellor?s=20
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/n7drGjh
Summary
In this week's community call, there the team offered a better insight into the testing phase of Tellor X and how the tutorials would be organized, both through videos and text documents. They ask everyone interested to participate in testing not to be afraid to reach out to them. It will be done on the Rinkeby test platform. A small discussion erupted on the new Telliot design, how it should be more user-friendly and how rewards will be minted in the new system. On the AMPL proposal there are no big news, except that one of their brightest community members reached out to the team with more questions, and they had a very fruitful conversation. They are trying to push the discussion forward. The significance of decentralization was touched again, with stressing how special Tellor is in this niche. The team has signed up for some events in the coming months, so there’ll be more contact with other teams. There were some questions regarding new reporters boarding, partnerships, price prediction, Cardano and ChainLink partnership thoughts, and even a treasury discussion trigger. Worth the read down below.
Whole discussion
Nick: Hey everyone, welcome to the Tellor community call! September 28th! Super exciting week, lots going on. Should be a short a nice call though. Just giving out some updates and answering your questions. First thing, Tellor X; we’re hoping it’s done with the audit next week. Fingers crossed the auditor will be done by then. And then we’ll bundle up the last few things on the contract. So usually we’ll make the fixes, send them back and get the sign off and we'll be good to go. The point when the team really starts testing it out. It’s looking really, really good. Tim has been doing great job with that. Actually, next week our man Tim is going to do a contract walkthrough for everyone. It’s going to be super technical. Obviously, we’ll be literally walking through solidity code, but at the same time I’m sure it will be very digestible, and we’ll try to explain it. There’re no stupid questions. Definitely just come and ask us questions about why did we write the code a certain way or even how it works if something isn’t clear.
Mike: Even if you’re not a dev, and you absorb like 10% of the information from that call it’s still going to be super valuable and there's a few of us non-devs that are going to be in the call as well, we’ll try to ask some questions on your behalf as well.
Nick: It’s super cool, because you’d be shocked at how many big projects are out there, that nobody but the team that wrote the code has walked through their code. It’s a shocking number. The more of you that go in there and look at it and ask, even just dumb questions. It makes us think about why we built it this way and how should it be. Especially it’s important now when we can still make some changes before, we launch it. Other than that Brenda is working on on the initial sequence of events we’re going to do once Tellor X launches. So, as you guys know we’re moving away from this whole “rewards are tied directly in the code” to we have to mint rewards to the oracle contract. How many rewards and for how long are we going to be minting these rewards for. The other thing is the team's salaries and everything. It’s kind of this whole DAO’s structure now, so we’re going to be initially minting ourselves. In the past we were getting the dev-share, but the dev-share piece is going away, so we’ll just have to mint ourselves the salaries. And then we have to mint new treasuries. So how much are we going to mint, what kind of interest rates we’re going to have on those. There’s no right answer to it, but we’re just going to be writing it down probably over the next few of weeks and we’ll have something to share with you guys. But if you have thoughts or want to help us out, let us know! Other things, a new Teliot implementation for Tellor X is up and running, we’ll probably be launching Tellor X on Rinkeby within 2 weeks. If you want to help test it or be a miner on Rinkeby reach out to us. We’d love to have you guys on there, it’s probably going to be a lot of debugging and hiccups along the way for the first little bit, but it’ll be fun. If you want to get involved that way even if you’re not a coder you can help us just by telling us what breaks. Let us know! Mike, anything on your side?
Mike: I don’t think there’s anything to update with AMPL, you could mention how the conversation with one of their main community members went, just briefly. We got on a private call with one of their brightest community members that has been the most constructive and strong in his feedback previously when we did our first proposal and he’s been super helpful, and we had a great 1-on-1 with him. I think we have won him over. He’s now certainly quite the expert on Tellor which was nice to see. We’ve noticed so far in their community, there hasn’t been the sort of pushback that was the last time we did this proposal. I think that’s what we were looking for. That's what the founders were looking for as well. We’re hopeful that within the next couple of weeks...
Nick: Yeah, we’ve been pushing them to get it moving forward. I mean we got some good feedback, talking about what are some of the shortfalls of Tellor, how much cost the attack, and where things have hit him, it was really good feedback, and we really took it to the heart. Brenda was giving him a hard time because he was comparing us, going with a fine comb over everything wrong with Tellor, but then you guys use ChainLink. It’s not quite the same. If you’re concerned about Tellor’s decentralization, it’s good that you’re concerned about that, you should be and you should poke us in the right way.
Mike: What’s the saying, “Everytime you point a finger, there’s 3 of them pointing right back at you”. Anyway, it ended positively, and we think that we have a new community member ourselves. We’d like to see it! Current events still going on: Eth online is still going on, we’re seeing some activity there with the hackers, which is positive. We have Eth Lisbon happening at the end of October. We just signed up for Eth Portland, a newly announced event, just within the last couple of days.
Nick: And we’re going to speak there, right Mike?
Mike: Right! You are! Maybe me.
Nick: You guys want to hear Mike speak! We should push Mike to speak!
Mike: If a hundred of you request it then I’ll do it.
Nick: You guys hear me speak all the time. Need more Mike.
Mike: Boring. What else? By the end of this week, website update, we’ve finalized the copy and the design, we’re just doing the final touches on it in the next couple of days, so by Friday we’ll be locked in on the design side, and we’ll be able to share that with you guys. Then we’re moving on with the build, the coding aspect of the website itself. It’s not a simple website. It’s ambitious and exciting, so we hope to share some of the visuals with you guys, so you can see what it’s going to look like, and how it’s going to function, sometime this weekend. That’s all that I have on top of my head. Unless anybody have anything else. Let’s move onto the questions then.
Q1: Any update on how us newbies could become reporters, would there be tutorials?
Nick: I’m guessing there will be tutorials. Yes. We’ll be kind of walking you guys through it.
Mike: The plan is to focus on having this be as user friendly as possible. This is the first time we’re putting so much effort into designing the Telliot software from the ground up to have a better UX and our ambition is to make it really user friendly. And part of that is having the best walkthroughs. With video components, and text instructions and things like that. If you’re interested in being an early tester of those things that’s really valuable to have somebody walk through the instructions and say “Oh I got stuck here”, so we can optimize it.
Nick: Also, with Telliot, it’s not going to be, unfortunately with a lot of things in crypto, this is new software. Probably right when we launch Tellor X, it’s not like we’re going to have a sea of tutorials and it’s going to be a perfectly developed software. That’s why we’re looking for testers. Even on mainnet in the beginning because you’re staking a 100 TRB and you risk losing that if the software breaks. We want to make sure you guys understand the risk there and also that early on there’s going to be some hiccups in the software. There always is. Things might freeze, you might need to be pulling updates on a frequent basis. So, if you’re okay with doing that, we’d like to have you on board. But it’s not going to be one of these smart contracts like Uniswap, where you just stake and you’re done with it. It’s going to be a little bit more involved, especially early on.
Q2: Any updates on partnerships?
Mike: Well, I touched on the AMPL one, that’s moving along.
Nick: I think the RIE piece, that’s like in December or something like that. That’s kind of in a holding pattern, sort of. Same with a few other chains we were talking to, but they said they will be going with us on Tellor X. We’re just reaching out to a few other people. Had a call with that guy who reached out to us on Discord. Super nice guy, they will be launching in October and there are some fun stuffs we can do with them.
Mike: Yeah, they seem to really like us, and we’re in this pre-Tellor X period, we’re really focusing on that. In a way this is a new product, a new offering.
Q3: Have you guys thought about collaborating and social networking with more content creators to bring upon awareness to this oracle project?
Nick: So, we have the bounties available, it’s tough to find good content. What are we talking about as far as content? NFTs, articles and podcasts and things like that, it can get tough, I don’t know what are your thoughts, Mike?
Mike: Well Re-imagined are one of the largest content creators in crypto, that’s how I would actually define them more than a conference company or media company. So we have partnered with them for the last 3 months and we have 3 more months with them. They have put out a ton of content and they are growing pretty big. In the past we had, I wouldn’t even call them partnerships, we had some interviews, or people did a sort of walkthrough about what Tellor is, or a Tellor breakdown, and they were your typical crypto youtubers. A lot of them dried up once Tellor wasn’t the new kid on the block. I guess we weren’t that attractive to those content creators as we were back then. These content creators are not like people that we follow, I’m speaking for myself personally, but I think most of us on this team are not crypto traders who are constantly following a bunch of the shillers on Youtube. That said though, if you guys know, we would like to lean on you guys, because you’re the audience. Our community member is the audience for these guys. If there are people that you really recommend, that would do a good quality job, there are ones that are better than the others for sure. Recommend them to us, put out a google doc, that is sort of a public google doc and you guys can add some names to that. If you guys have a name of a youtuber, or if you have contact information for them or an email address, we’d be happy to reach out just to see what they offer, see what kind of content they put out, see if it fits for us. As Nick said there are bounties for it, so if you arrange it for us and it’s something that we kind of want to do or it fits our vibe, then you can get a bounty for it. Help us out!
Q4: Thoughts on ChainLink and Cardano partnership?
Nick: Wish them a long happy marriage. I don’t know, seriously. Whenever you are a centralized oracle, all you do is you have to write data to some chain. It’s really easy to go to other chains. And that’s great. At the same time though, there isn’t anything there. With Tellor it’s really hard for us to go to other chains that don’t have native bridges because your miners have to be staked. You write something to Cardano and you are staked on Ethereum, it doesn’t really make sense, like you have to bridge back and slash them on Ethereum? It is really difficult.
Mike: And who bridges them back?
Nick: Yeah, it just doesn’t make any sense. I actually had a call with Charlie3, they are Cardano’s native oracle, that’s what they call themselves. The guys are trying to build an oracle on Cardano, and they reached out to me for advice on how to build an oracle, and if we would be able to help. And I sat there with them for probably an hour and they just asked good questions about trying to build a decentralized oracle. It was honestly the first project that had any faith on with regards to Cardano. They are still waiting for Cardano’s things to launch. So, they’re just in a holding pattern. But they want to build it the right way. Hopefully people on Cardano can build it the right way.
Mike: But with Tellor X, it will be an easier, I don’t want to say easy, but it’ll make more sense for us in the right situation to deploy on other chains. We’re still going to be picky and choosy about that. We will have more opportunities to do things like that with Tellor X.
Nick: Cardano is super hard with Haskell. We don’t have the money to hire a Haskell developer.
Mike: Some Phds.
Q5: Could we possibly get a beta test available to the public before Tellor X launch?
Nick: Yeah, we’ll be doing it on Rinkeby for 2 weeks to a month. Hop on there and test it out.
Q6: Regarding Tellor treasuries do you have any idea on the APY of the staking, and would it be done through hardware or mobile wallets?
Nick: Brenda, what are we thinking so far about the APY?
Brenda: We haven’t decided really, because it doesn’t require a lot it to be high, but to be honest it can always be changed by the DAO in the future.
Nick: We’re thinking about like 3-5%?
Brenda: I was thinking 3%.
Nick: Yeah, something around that, just to throw the numbers out. So, what are the rates currently out there in the crypto space for not doing anything. Especially it is fixed for this period of time. We want to be competitive, but we don’t want to over-pay, we also don’t want to under-pay either. Especially in the beginning maybe we’ll go a little bit higher to make sure we hit our targets.
Brenda: It should be something that we’d look at every quarter and it might change.
Mike: And it will be part of the discussion, that’s the best part. We’ll have our opinions; you guys will have yours.
Nick: We’ll have the Tellor open market committee. We’re going to have meetings every quarter.
Chris: Just for the community to be aware, for every next round, the community can over-write the interest rate, right?
Nick: Yeah, anybody can propose one. You could propose this quarter, and you can propose one the next day to mint even more. And at a 100% interest rate. If you really want to. We’ll just have to decide as a community what we want to do. Obviously, you don’t want that, it’s kind of dangerous in a way. We’ll see how it goes, and maybe we’ll add some limits and controls there. Imagine if Tellor becomes really popular and a bunch of plebs holding coins and they start voting things through. Same as if the US treasury was governed like “We’re just going to mint ourselves money”. It would be downhill pretty quickly or politicians to start run on it. You don’t want that to happen. Right now, most of the people, especially participating in the votes seem to have the long-term interest of Tellor in mind.
Brenda: So, we’ll have a plan sort of for the first year, and then as they say you can propose whatever you want.
Q7: Why is the price of TRB not exciting? Is there any hope of getting back to over 100$? I unfortunately had to sell 70% of my TRB for 55$.
Nick: Price talk is always hard. I remember we had a lot of fallbacks that were really bad, so I never like to say that it’s the end. You know initially we had, it was December 2019, we hit 8$, and we were excited, it was our first round, 2000%. Then we crashed to a buck or something. And then we slowly started going back up, and we hit 89$ for 1 second in August of 2020 then we dropped back to like 10$ or something. It hurts every time. It’s a rollercoaster. And we didn’t surpass that August high of 89$ until the following year. We’d only beaten it in a while. There’re just these really big peaks in Tellor, but we’re doing relatively well how we have held around 40$ for so long, and we’re holding higher and higher amount each time. So probably the next peak will shoot up to 300$ and then will be back down to 80$ for a year. And then everyone will be like why the hell did I buy it for 300$… It’s rough.
Brenda: You just never know, but at the very minimum you guys should know that we are working really hard and try to make a protocol is a long-term thing. Prices in crypto are prices in crypto. Wild.
Q8: Last question: When will Tellor X come out?
Nick: I think it’s hopefully early November time we’re looking at. We’ll keep you guys updated if any issues come up during the audit or something comes up during testing. But that’s our target date.
Mike: Probably in two weeks we’ll be able to adjust that if necessary.
Brenda: Once the audit is done, we can give you guys a better idea where we’re going to be at.
Nick: Super exciting! Reach out to us if you guys need anything! Should be a really fun week, and we’re looking forward to continue it. Seems like every week we have more and more people on Discord, and people engaging, different people, which is also exciting. Thanks everyone, and talk to you next week!
