It’s a new format for our community updates from here on out! We are moving to quarterly frequency for these things where we will review the previous period and give a glimpse on what’s coming next. Because this is the first quarterly update there will be some redundant content from the last two previous monthly updates.
Q2 2020 was an interesting one. To begin the quarter, fresh off the back of Black Thursday and the ever increasing fear from the COVID-19 pandemic, it was all about staying the course and keeping our head down, focused on the V2, the ACS, and growing our community.
So, what did Tellor do in Q2? Let’s get into it, but first some quick stats:
Q2 Community Stats
Twitter followers: 4162 (+40% from Q1)
Telegram members: 2982 (+30% from Q1)
Tech Updates
Tellor has been busy on the tech side in Q2. The biggest news for token holders is that the V2 Tellor system is almost here. An audit by Certik in July should allow us to deploy upgrades in August to both 10x the throughput of the system and provide greater security for the network. Details of v2 can be found here: https://medium.com/tellor/proposed-v2-upgrades-dd3c325ce49a
Additionally, we also completed some important upgrades to the Tellor Miner. By creating a more robust miner, we now support time weighted averages, end of day prices, and even volume weighted metrics as we work to provide defi with the necessary pieces to create robust applications.
Lastly, we’ve been hard at work making life better for users and future users of Tellor. We’ve completed the ACS system and are planning for deployment on Matic next quarter, allowing dapps of Matic to finally have censorship resistant data feeds. Additionally, we’ve also developed two front ends for users, disputes.tellorscan.com and prices.tellorscan.com, allowing users to have an excellent interface for interacting with Tellor smart contracts. We’ve been tinkering around with them so we haven’t made a formal announcement of them yet, but that will be coming very soon.
Building on Tellor
Tellor knows that users need to be drawn to us. We’ve been working hard to make it better than ever to use Tellor, including upgrading our documentation and our “usingtellor” npm package, creating a better, even simpler, integration for users.
BuidlHub
Tellor needed a way to ask our miners for specific price pairs based on market conditions. If the price of ETH moves up or down 1%, for example, we want to make sure the value is updated by our miners. So we approached BUIDLHub and asked them to automate this process by periodically checking market conditions and submitting data requests to Tellor. Learn more here.
Vulcan Feeds
Our friends over at Vulcan Feeds made an excellent javascript library for interacting with Tellor. “Tellor-js” is a framework they wrote for their own feeds and by making it open source, they’re really furthering the usability of Tellor and the open source ethos in general.
Content By Tellor
What is an oracle and why does it matter?
This was a piece for those of you just learning about decentralized finance, or DeFi. This article will give you a good idea of what this growing niche is trying to achieve as a sub-industry of blockchain.
Our most recent article here was a piece on the current standards for settlement prices in DeFi; why many protocols are doing it wrong and how to do it right. We really recommend getting familiar with this one.
Tellor in the Wild
Tom Heavey Interview
At the beginning of April our CSO Michael Zemrose was a guest on Tom Heavey’s youtube channel talking about all things Tellor. Tom is one of the nicest guys and truly cares about good honest crypto education — definitely one to follow and support. Here’s the link to the full video + some short excerpts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frHL3J2NAOo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2oPrXnCAfk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EryIEkOWl4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ce1596wxTg
Week In Ethereum
It’s always a pleasure to be featured in Week In Ethereum and on April 5th our Oracle Best Practices article was listed in the For Developers section: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-april-5-2020/
DeFi Discussions by Dystopia Labs
At the beginning of May we had the pleasure of sponsoring “DeFi Discussions” a virtual conference organized and hosted by Hsin-Ju of Dystopia Labs. Our CTO Nick Fett gave two presentations, one on the Current Oracle Landscape breaking down all the oracle types being currently used in DeFi and commentary on the issues with them, and the second on our Oracle Best Practices a list of important considerations one should take when using any oracle in your projects.
EthIndia Hackathon: Chain Runner
Tellor sponsored its first hackathon this quarter! The great guys who run EthIndia and Devfolio, who organize the largest hackathon events in Asia reached out to us and asked us to be involved and we decided to take part. For those of you unfamiliar with hackathons, they are programming and software development sprints where teams compete for bounties and prizes based on project criteria put out by organizations who sponsor. They really support the growth of the ecosystem as they both serve as a way to onboard new people into building on blockchain tech and Ethereum, but also some of today’s most successful projects start off as hacks — Tellor did! Additionally for this hackathon Nick was asked to give a workshop on implementing Tellor, check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVp2ED6h3x4
Matic Masterclass
At Tellor and in the crypto world, we’re experimenting with fundamental pieces of economics, things that only kings and central banks in the past have been able to command. At the end of June Our CTO, Nick was invited to present a talk for the Matic Masterclass video series to go over why countries are poor and then talk about how these new tools, namely crypto and censorship resistant technologies can help. Watch it here: Crypto and Developing Nations.
Looking Forward to Q3
All in all, Q2 was a major leap forward in both the development side and the growing credibility of Tellor. It’s taken a lot of patience and hard work, but we feel like we really turned a corner recently. Of course we are just getting started.
Q3 is going to be fun.
To kick it off we’ll be formally announcing our new front ends: Tellor Data and the Dispute Center. These are the places users can go to both see Tellor’s updating price feed and monitor mining submissions and dispute/vote on bad values.
Our V2 launch is targeted for a mid August launch, pending an audit, and we are really excited to bring those upgrades to our network. Look out for a new website and whitepaper to accompany our V2 as well.
Lastly, we are ramping up our involvement in industry events and hackathons, beginning with Unitize2020. We have a number of others lined up this fall. We look forward to more and more people learning about and building on Tellor.
And there you have it folks, thanks for reading and stay tuned!
