2019 has been a year of new beginnings and forward momentum. We’ve had our nose to the proverbial grind-stone; #buidling and aiming for the moon. But as 2019 winds down to it’s concluding weeks we’ve decided to take a brief pause and look back at where we’ve come and what have we done. Let’s take a look at Tellor’s 2019 year in review!
But First…
To start, we have to reach back a little bit beyond a year ago, into summer of 2018, when Tellor was just a twinkle in our eye. We we were still the founders of Daxia, the decentralized derivatives protocol; and more importantly, a protocol that was using a centralized price oracle and looking for a better solution for themselves. You see, Tellor started off as a weekend hackathon project at Angelhack DC 2018. There we put together the initial design for a Mineable Oracle Contract, a proof of work competition for price data on Ethereum. We dubbed this the Proof Of Work Oracle (POWO).
https://twitter.com/AngelHack/status/1016022842427760640
https://medium.com/@nfett/proof-of-work-oracle-6de6f795d27
We didn’t quite realize yet that we were onto something but continued tinkering away and after our 1st security audit not going as well we hoped,didn’t quite have the right crypto-economic structure (thanks Authio!), we redesigned the oracle and began to feel more confident in the decisions we were making.
Early 2019 — Pivot to Tellor
And so this brings us up to the start of 2019! It was in the early weeks that the Daxia team began to acknowledge the writing on the wall (literally), as we spent more and more time whiteboarding Proof Of Work Oracle related discussions. It was truly bittersweet to all look at each other and admit that we were more excited about the more immediate possibilities for this oracle project than our derivatives protocol. We decided to pivot! This was also around the time we got wind of an opportunity to apply for Binance Labs, the venture arm of Binance with an initiative to incubate, invest, and empower blockchain and cryptocurrency projects. Just like buying a new outfit for a big job interview, we thought our oracle needed a new brand…thus Tellor was born. We applied, went through the rigorous interview process and were accepted to the Berlin cohort of Binance Labs Season 2 which began in April.
April through May — Binance Labs Incubation
During our time in Germany we truly accelerated development on Tellor and finalized our design in May. Here is a recap of our time with Binance Labs written by our CEO, Brenda Loya: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/between-buidling-living-brenda-loya/
June through Aug — From Audit to Mainnet
In June, we announced the completion of our final audit with the great team at Certik. The runway was clear for takeoff! Time to prep for mainnet launch.
July was a month spent on testnet doing our best to make sure everything wouldn’t just break once we launched but the REAL test is mainnet. So without further ado we crossed a few t’s and dotted a few i’s and launched to mainnet on August 1st.
Since Tellor uses a decentralized network of miners to submit price data on-chain, miners are foundational to our oracle. Due to this, our launch activity was heavily focused on the mining network: managing the influx of miners, building a mining community, running a literal helpdesk to help with setup and troubleshooting, all the while debugging and iterating on the mining software.
Sep — Dec
The last quarter of the year was all about real organic growth. In this time period we saw our initial miner community reach over 100 miners, we reached #7 on the Eth Gas Station charts, got our first exchange listings, on IDEX, Radar Relay, and Eterbase, had our social communities grow over 2000 members, and key influencers are taking notice, like Blockchain Brad, who reached out to us for an interview in December.
We travelled across the globe to represent ourselves proudly at Devcon 5 in Japan. There we learned we’d be receiving grant funding and mentorship from Consensys Grants, and established several key relationships with other projects. Once, home we began what we are calling the Alliance of Decentralized Oracles (ADO), a group of oracles and oracle users we are bringing together to lead the standardization of on-chain oracle data. After several meetings the ADO have posted our EIP for a standard interface for pull oracles for pricing/numeric data, this will help enable different oracle implementations to be interchangeable and lead to increased security for customers.
We are proud of how the community has grown with a strong foundation of members who really care about the values of decentralization and we are happy they’ve deemed us one of “the few good projects” out there.
In just a short few months time have gone from idea to mainnet and everything in between. This week has a been a great time for Tellor to reflect on all we’ve accomplished, even if just for a fleeting moment or two, before we inevitably place our noses right back to the grindstone to make 2020 the year of the unstoppable apps, the year of decentralized oracles.
