Today marks a special day for the Tellor team and our community. We have released the whitepaper for a major overhaul of our oracle protocol — Tellor X.
Tellor has been live on Ethereum for nearly 2 years now and it’s been a long road establishing ourselves as a major competitor in the oracle space. Tellor X continues our work towards being the preeminent decentralized oracle using crypto-economic incentives, but is now announcing our plans for exciting changes including a novel monetary policy, more equitable governance, and the removal of the proof of work component; creating a broader, more accessible, and ultimately, more secure network of oracle data reporters.
Here are some of the Highlights:
No more PoW
The highly competitive Proof of Work mining component in the current Tellor system will be removed from Tellor X. This means that Tellor X will become much faster and more flexible.
Tellor “miners” will now be called “reporters.” Only one reporter will be needed to record a data point, and receive rewards. When a user tips the tellor for a specific ID, a network of decentralized reporters will race to get the value updated so that they can get that tip. An individual reporter may submit as many or a few data points as they wish, and the dispute mechanism remains in place. This will allow tellor to deploy reporters on non-ethereum networks / L2 without sacrificing security. The speed with which Tellor X can update data is limited only by how much and how often a user tips the reporter network.
This also opens up the accessibility of becoming a Tellor reporter to a much broader participant base (any TRB holder running the requisite software and performing the reporting) than we had previously with miners — by unbounding it from the hardware requirements of PoW computation.
Supply Growth Changes
In the current Tellor system, the majority of the supply growth goes to Tellor miners exclusively. In Tellor X, the “data reporters” will certainly be getting the bulk of rewards but the overall supply growth is beholden to Tellor governance and can be used for discreet minting events such as awarding grants to users or rewards for reporters on alternative chains. Additionally, for Tellor X, time-based rewards are greatly reduced. The current tellor “block” reward creates 5 TRB every 5 minutes. The proposed Tellor X time-based reward scheme will drip only 1.0 TRB / 10 Minutes.
Improved Liveness Guarantee
An important change to the dispute mechanism is a new crypto-economic incentive layer that will ensure that disputed values that have been removed from the database are replaced very quickly. After a dispute, 10% of the dispute fee goes automatically to a tip of the same data type (ID) that was removed. Assuming reporters will seek to profit from that tip, this will result in a prompt update.
Bytes Data
Current Tellor can only provide numerical data, with Tellor X we are moving to bytes data. This gives our oracle both a greater range of data types (e.g. information for bridging chains) and the ability to provide more data, in batches, per transaction. We’ve been looking forward to this change for a long time!
Tellor Treasuries
Tellor Treasuries are staking pools where holders can lock their TRB to earn interest for a set period of time. However, these are not entirely passive rewards! Treasury holders are required to vote on Tellor Improvement Proposals (or delegate their voting power) to receive the maximum reward. TRB holders will be able to vote on a quarterly basis, the amount of TRB able to be locked in the treasury vault, effectively giving our community means for a monetary policy, that is adjusting the circulating supply of TRB.
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These highlights are just a part of the whole that is the Tellor X whitepaper so be sure to read the full spec. We hope it excites our community, and user base as much as it does us. Join the conversation in our discord if you have any comments or questions.
