2024 – A Year In Review

Overview

Another trip around the sun, another year on the frontline of tackling the oracle problem. The majority of 2024 was spent with heads down & focused on building out Tellor Layer, our new L1 chain built to focus on providing robust, censorship-resistant oracle data. On the heels of excitement from Layer’s announcement made at the end of 2023, it was time for rubber to meet the road and take on the sizable task of building a standalone blockchain while simultaneously maintaining the current version of Tellor and navigating an interesting year not just in crypto history, but world history as well.

Let’s take a stroll….

Tellor Layer

A new frontier: With the foundation of building Layer well under way by the new year, the first half of 2024 was predominantly spent putting together the complete structure, with multiple learnings & design pivots made along the way. Wanting to document this process we put together a repository based on these design decisions, called Architecture Design Records. This repo serves not only as a record of why certain decisions were made, but also provides transparency for others in the space who might benefit from these lessons on their own journey. After the immense amount of time and effort put in by Akrem (blockchain), Tim (bridging), and Dan (testing), it wasn’t until Q3 where Layer first went to audit, and even later in August, where we deployed our first testnet, Antietam, and opened it to the public. Even as this article is being written, Layer has since gone back in the lab with the core team, and under a 2nd audit, before it opens back up to the public to be rigorously tested on a new testnet, Chickamauga.

Integrations and Deployments

No brakes: While building a blockchain from the ground up is no simple task, the current & active version of Tellor remained humming along, and required an equal amount of love, not only to grow the ecosystem, but to keep the brand fresh in the mind of a fickle industry needing constant reminders of its north star. Spuddy played a major role here in user integration from setting up initial feeds, & monitoring Telliot’s upkeep for the reporting community. Meanwhile, Ryan has been hodling down the maintenance of our front-ends, social and outreach.

This year we saw notable user integrations with projects like Gyroscope, Aurelius, Threshold and deployed current Tellor to several new chains: Base, Linea, Mantle, Polygon zkEvm, Scroll, Lisk, & more.

Travel

The World Tour(!): In-person events were also a large focus during this building period. Cognizant of how easy it is to disappear from the conversation while you’re deep in development, Tellor core made a concerted effort to emphasize face-to-face interactions, traveling to 10+ cities around the world. The goal being to continue growing the ecosystem for current Tellor, while also planting seeds about its next evolution. From Cosmoverse in Dubai and EthCC in Brussels to DevCon in Singapore and the classic EthDenver; earth was covered in Tellor’s tracks.

New Addition to the Team

New Blood -> Absolute Stud: From the depths of the internet, Go-Guru and all-around cracked developer, Caleb, has been a stellar addition to Tellor core. His technical skills, insatiable appetite to understand how everything works together, and ability to adapt on the fly have been a huge value-add. It’s hard to imagine a 2024 without the guy!

Thought Leadership

Practice What You Preach: Another important focus for us during this period of intensive development was to increase Tellor’s thought leadership in the space. In tandem with his written think-pieces, CTO Nick Fett recorded 21 Protocol Deep Dives with projects in the space, digging into the intricacies of protocol design and making friends along the way. Additionally, with the help from the world-renowned Party Action People, both Nick & Brenda took the stage for prime slots of both presentations and panel discussions. Another highlight of 2024 was Brenda’s helping found the DC DAO, which came out of the gates with a splash in its inaugural EthDC event, bringing together world-class minds in the nation’s capitol. In a year of potentially groundbreaking reform for the entire crypto industry in the U.S., Brenda’s key role in the DC DAO has afforded Tellor invaluable brand equity in what surely looks to be a colorful discussion in 2025.

2025, A Look Forward

Strap In: With 2024 fading in the rearview mirror, 2025 aims to usher in a new era of hope not just with the incoming crypto-friendly administration of the U.S., but the potential of Layer as an evolution of current Tellor. With increased efficiencies in Tellor’s crypto-economics for its reporters/validators, interoperability in a multichain landscape, robustness of data integrity behind each reported piece of data, and even a new swoosh(!) – we’re eager to watch it humming along and witness Layer reach its full potential.

This upcoming year will be primarily focused on deploying Layer’s mainnet and providing censorship-resistant, permissionsless, crypto-economically secured oracle data for users across the crypto universe. There is still work to be done before we get there, but as we close out the chapter that is 2024, we buckle our seatbelts, rev our engines, and white-knuckle into 2025 while yelling out the window… (click me)

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