Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8G_x6nzKWc&t=76s&ab_channel=Tellor
Project website: www.tellor.io
https://twitter.com/WeAreTellor?s=20
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/n7drGjh
https://www.reddit.com/r/TellorOfficial/
A very fruitful call on the state of Tellor Flex and the Tellor treasuries. Also, quite a lot of interesting questions, that have been answered by the team.
Whole discussion
Mike: Hey guys, welcome to another Tellor community call! It’s the 11th of January, 2022. Just a few updates. The team has been busy on Tellor Flex stuff, and working on the Tellor treasuries. I think we’re on the cusp of launching the Tellor treasuries. I know Nick did a presentation on Tellor’s treasuries that you guys can check out on YouTube, for those of you that are more interested in that. We are looking to launch those sometime at the end of the week or early next week. We’re interested to hear more from you guys on what’s the best timing, but our aim is to be ready by Friday. And we’ll keep you guys posted on any specific launching dates around those treasuries. Brenda, Spuddy, anything you want to share with people, to remind them about the treasuries? Spuddy?
Brenda: The main thing I guess is, if you’re interested on being part of the treasuries, we are going to look, everyone is going to know when that’s going to be proposed, and once it goes into effect, we will allow everybody to jump in first. Eventually though if it doesn’t get filled, we might stake ourselves, so first come first serve, that’s how they work. There is a limit to them, so if you’re interested, make sure that you go and buy some as soon as they’re issued.
Spuddy: How long do you think you would, the team will wait? Any ideas on that question? There’s three months and if the treasury is not full, even if it’s just the last day, somebody could still stake and get rewards, so I mean the team wouldn’t wait until the last day, but I don’t know.
Mike: I don’t think we would.
Brenda: I think maybe about a week or so, because at the end of the day I asked the team. We were just, we don’t sell, we try not to sell our tokens, because they’re part of our governance, so they’re just sitting there, but we do want the community to jump in first and give them first take on it, but also, we don’t want somebody to do at the last minute. I think a week, max two weeks. It’s more than enough. The treasuries that we’re going to propose at this point, we’re only thinking about a 100k of TRB tokens, so it’s not going to be a lot you know.
Mike: Right, you could easily fill it up, but what point is that serving, because like Brenda was saying.
Spuddy: We would rather have the community fill it up. What we would rather see happen, and kind of the whole gist of it is, if you’re going to buy TRB, you’re going to hold TRB, and you’re going to hold it for more than three months, it’s kind of a no-brainer. You need to take gas costs into consideration, because you know, it calls a contract function, which is what this is going to be. You’re going to call a contract function with a METAMASK wallet or whatever and then you’ll pay a gas fee to buy the treasury stake. That gas fee could be like 0.02 Ethereum or less than that, probably less than that, but that would be on a high gas today, that’s what it could cost. So, if a TRB is worth 0.01 Ethereum, then you know... I did a little bit of rough estimate, I mean if you’re going to stake something like a thousand TRB, then that’s very safe, you’re going to make a profit with that much. If you’re thinking about staking less than that, then think about the gas, you can talk to us about it, so that’s just something to keep in mind.
Brenda: And it’s not just a gas for when you buy it, when you lock your tokens into the treasury, but also in order for you to actually get the benefits of the treasury or the APR. You actually have to vote on these fields and proposals during the time that it’s there and your reward is actually based on the percentage, it’s basically prorated based on how many of those disputes or proposals you actually voted on.
Mike: You can delegate though if they choose to.
Brenda: They can delegate. That’s absolutely true, if you don’t want to deal with that, you can also delegate and then you don’t have to worry about those gas costs, but if you do want to participate on those yourself without delegation, then keep those costs in mind as well.
Spuddy: There’s going to be clear instructions for all of this too. I’ll make sure that we have clear instructions for all of this, we just don’t have that right now unfortunately, but you’ll have plenty of time if you want to participate in treasuries. There’s going to have plenty of time for people to buy TRB on exchanges if they want to participate, so that’s an exciting part of it too.
Brenda: And this is only the first part at the beginning, we’re planning on doing this about once a quarter and we’re going to be learning from this as we issue them. We’ll learn where the thresholds are in terms of the rate return and just the participation and the length and all those things might change over time, but at first obviously, we’re just going to do a best guess and then see what the reaction is and then adjust from there. But like Spuddy said, this is not the one treasury thing, it’s like a learning process, so you will have a chance to jump in eventually.
Mike: And that’s the last point. If you feel like you don’t fit the bill for someone that can participate in Tellor treasury and you feel left out, it’s totally in your benefit that other people that can or it makes more sense it’s like larger token holders or people that essentially don’t care as much about the gas fees. It benefits everybody that those people participate.
Spuddy: There’s like a huge chunk of the supply that’s not on exchanges, that’s going to now be locked, that wasn’t before.
Mike: Yep, so out of the circulating supply, and that’s good if you want the price to go up. I’m not saying that it necessarily will have those effects, but that’s the theory around this kind of monetary policy stuff and we’re going, it’ll be interesting to see how it works if a token community can change volatility in some way through incorporation.
Brenda: The main goal is not to go up or down, but actually to make it stable, as we do these treasuries, we want to lock up these tokens because it takes them out of circulation, but the main goal, just keep this in mind is not to actually try and get the price to go up, but actually to make it stable, so that our users can actually use the protocol with a stable cost in mind and then you know, our holders, well, I don’t know. But the main goal is not just raising the price, it’s actually stabilizing the price, so keep that in mind.
Spuddy: Well said.
Mike: Correct. That’s that for the Tellor treasuries. Stay tuned, we’ll keep you updated this week. Other things, we are going to do a bit of a presentation around Tellor Flex. For those of you guys have been curious about Tellor Flex, which is the non-Ethereum structure that we’ve been working on for Tellor oracles on other chains. Tim’s been leading the development of that and is going to go in a little bit more detail. And I guess we, other updates. I think we really don’t have too much to really update on anything else, I’m just trying to think before we jump into that, Tim.
Spuddy: Polygon has been deployed on their test-net Mumbai; I think it’s called Mumbai.
Mike: We’re going a big, we said we’re going to be showing up at EthDenver this year, so there’s like a lot of, most of the team are going to go out there, so it’s like a logistical undertaking, that we’ve never done something like that. Really excited about that, but a lot of that’s happening this week, getting all that ironed out. Where we’re going to stay, flights, the whole nine. Preparation for us as a sponsor. We’ll have an actual booth, it’s not a virtual conference anymore, it’s like, it’s going to be a real tangible thing and so there’s a lot of booth materials that we need. New swag that we’ve ordered and we’ll let you guys know about that. We’re hoping to give away a lot of the stock at the event, but we’ll have some more swag for you guys to have as well. But anyway, without further ado, I’m going to hand it over to you Tim, tell us about Tellor Flex.
Tim: So, Tellor Flex is a really slimmed down version of Tellor X you could say. So, just Flex itself is one contract with just oracle functionality and I’ll go over. Just those main functions that contract, but to make Tellor Flex, we just found the few parts of Tellor X that you really need to make the Tellor oracle possible. And then, so one of the main features of Tellor X is that it doesn’t actually include governance, so it just has a few functions in it that can only be called by a governance address and so then that governance could look many different ways. It could just be a single person to make a centralized oracle or you can make it a contract with decentralized governance and voting. So, in the Tellor Flex contract itself, it really just has a few functions; you can deposit a stake and the main big difference between Tellor Flex and Tellor X with the deposit stake function is that in Flex, you can deposit multiple stakes with one address and with one deposit state transaction. So, the deposit state function has an input of a quantity of tokens, so then you can submit multiple times within the traditional time window from one address, whereas in Tellor X you had to, if you wanted to have multiple stakes, you’d have to split that between multiple addresses. So, that’s kind of a little convenience update. So, you don’t have to manage multiple addresses.
Spuddy: It’s because we expect the update speeds to be a lot faster, I think, right?
Tim: Right. Yeah, one of the big things we have to factor in is just the speed of different chains that we’re going on and the cost of transactions there. You know, the number of people that actually exist on a chain that will hold a token on that chain. So, this structure allows for a lot of flexibility, we can deal with different parameters, different conditions on different networks. So, you had that deposit stake function, along the same lines you have, a request staking withdrawal function similar to Tellor X and a withdraw stake. Request staking withdrawal just starts your waiting period before you can actually withdraw and in that period of time governance can slash your stake. And finally, we have submit value. Which is pretty much the same exact submit value as you see on Tellor X. Then you have two functions; remove value and slash reporter, and those are ones that can only be called by the governance address and we did it this way again because you can have many different governance structures. So, maybe on some small little used chain, some new coming up chain, might not have a lot of users over there, you might not have enough people to function as a governance community. Some project that wants to get an oracle up and running, they can have their team act as the governance and act as disputers. And then, those are just the main oracle functions. Then we have some getters, some of our traditional getters, so you can monitor what’s going on in the oracle, get data, get information about what reporters are doing and then there’s just a few other functions that are only called both by governance, like updating the stake amount, the governance address itself and that’s pretty much it in the Tellor Flex contract. So, I mean that simplifies things to such a huge degree, as opposed to when you look at the Tellor X repo, you can see that there are tons of contracts in there. This is just a very flexible system, it should be easy, relatively easy for different projects to even deploy them themselves on different networks and then, so we are also working on a governance contract to pair with Tellor Flex on Polygon and it’s being built for Polygon right now, but it could be used on other networks. This governance system will work in much the same way as Tellor X on main-net, so it has proposals and disputes. The disputes will be pretty much the same, they’ll work pretty much the same as they do on main-net, but proposals are much more limited in this system. For example, there won’t be any Tellor treasuries on Polygon. And the set of stakeholders in Flex will be a little bit different, so we’ll have four sets of stakeholders which are each going to have 25% voting weight. So, you’ll have token holders as one of those sets of stakeholders, you have reporters. So, reporters will have governance rights based on the number of reports they’ve submitted. One of the new stakeholders on Polygon will be the Tellor team multisig. Which will also have 25% voting rights. And then finally, kind of a new type of stakeholder, or way of calculating a stakeholder is the users which will also have 25% voting weight. So, that will be a set of addresses that can vote and these could be any of the projects that are using Tellor. This set of users will be voted on by the remaining three sets of stakeholders, so that set can change over time. You can add and remove users. That’s just about all of Tellor Flex.
Mike: Clarify, it wasn’t clear. These stakeholders, these four sets of individuals are going to be doing all the voting on proposals and disputes?
Tim: Yes.
Mike: Any sort of governance voting elements are handled by these four powers if you will.
Tim: Right.
Mike: What were they again? The four.
Tim: There’s the token holders, the reporters, the team multisig and then the users.
Spuddy: Yeah, that’s from the Tellor X contract anyway, right? It’s the same as it is with Tellor X I think.
Tim: It’s largely similar. It’s a little different though.
Ryan: Aren’t they weighted on Tellor X?
Tim: Yeah, on Tellor X, you get votes for being a reporter for your submissions, there’s votes for having added tips to the systema dn then there’s votes for people that are holding treasuries and then of course token holders. So, in Tellor X we don’t really have a designation for a set of users. They kind of counted indirectly through tips and just token holding. So, that’s kind of a new thing in Flex. Having a designation for users who don’t have to hold tokens necessarily or have tipped.
Mike: They’re just these addresses that get granted voting power.
Brenda: Do they get voted in Tim, or do they, how do these users get added?
Tim: Yeah, they get voted in. It’s a type of proposal. So, you can go to add or remove stakeholders to the user pool.
Brenda: And we’ll be providing like an example governance contract, but that could also be done by the user, or whoever.
Tim: Yeah, you mean, like creating some kind of governance for different networks.
Mike: Or even on Polygon, this Polygon governance contract is a bit of, it could just be a reference point, but a community on Polygon could write their own governance contract and use that with Tellor Flex if they wanted to.
Tim: Absolutely, and yeah, it’s built to be used in that way. So, I mean it’s very modular, whereas main-net Tellor X, it’s not built that way. It would be a little harder to build a custom governance. You could do it, but it’s just not made out of the box like that.
Spuddy: So, when main-net?
Brenda: We do have a goal. Early February. Hopefully February 1st. And for the Treasury we are going to kick off the vote for it on Friday, and then the vote will go for like seven days I believe and then the treasury will start.
Mike: Very cool, thanks a lot Tim, that was really nice. We’re really excited about Tellor Flex, I think, you know we’ve been trying to, we’ve experimented with different structures for alternate chains for a while now and it’s a tough problem to solve, because you do need that flexibility I think, we sort of realized we learned a lot from our previous attempts that made sense for both more established Layer-1s, but a lot of them come with the fact that they’re brand new and they haven’t really established much yet. Kind of works for everybody.
Spuddy: The users that want to use Tellor are not established in how they use oracles either. So, it makes sense for the structure to be as flexible as possible, because they, a specific user might want a different governance structure than you know, the rest of the users on an L2 or on Polygon or something like that.
Mike: Yeah, and so it’s really nice, we can just say like okay, well what makes sense for you guys, oh that works, we can do that. Versus trying to fit them into what we think is best. So, we’re really excited about. This is a product and we hope you guys are too. Feel free to ask us any questions if you, and we don’t have anybody from the community here live, but reach out to us in discord and submit questions for next week’s community call, we can answer them and while we’re talking about it, we might as well talk about today’s questions. Ryan, do you want to take over?
Ryan: Yeah.
Question1: We need partners.
Ryan: Not a question, that is a period and I think I half-agree. I think partners is a taboo word in the space. We need users. And yes, I 100% agree with that.
Brenda: And one of the reasons we’re going to Polygon is because we do have a user waiting for us. So, that’s basically how we prioritize which chains we move into. But definitely we need users.
Question2: A good development of the project, congrats to the team. A bad time because of the market environment. How are even small investors kept happy?
Brenda: You know, the one thing that comes out of this type of environment in the market is that you’re really going to see the projects that want to be there for the long term. We’re not going to stop as long as we have a runway basically. As always, we continue to have a budget, we’re going to continue to build and you know we have been sort of very conservative in terms of how we project our revenue or how we function our operations. But we’re going to continue to build it, is that timing I guess, but it shows that we’re not just here for the good times, we’re actually here building something that hopefully is going to be part of the infrastructure of what ends up happening in these environments. A lot of projects will go away, but the ones that survive and the ones that evolve, they’ll eventually just become better and we just want to be part of that infrastructure. So, that when everybody starts building again and the market starts gearing up again, then we’re there and at a better positioning than we were before. How do we keep everybody happy? I don’t think there’s a way that you can keep everybody happy. This is a very volatile market, no matter whether it’s Tellor or Ethereum or Bitcoin and I think that most of the people when they come in, it’s just good for them to educate themselves in what they’re getting into, but in the long run I think that blockchain has so much potential, what we’re building is not something that’s going to go away tomorrow. Unfortunately, it is still very risky, because it’s very young, but we’re here, we’re going to be building and we’re not going anywhere. You can see us on discord, you can see us on probably some of us in telegram too. But reach out, we’re not going anywhere.
Mike: Yep, I would just encourage all the smaller token holders or whoever, everybody really, to just actually engage and become members of the community, because there’s benefit of when things are really good then we all can celebrate together and when things are down, we have that sort of cathartic experience of like, we’re all in this together when it’s bad too. I think people do get benefit from that and enjoy. It brings us together at times too and I think everyone laughs at it.
Spuddy: I think we have a great group and discord, that’s come together lately. There’s a bunch of you guys that are sticking around and you believe in us and it’s awesome to see. Since I’ve been paying attention, I’ve seen you know, when TRB price goes up, we gain community, when Tellor price goes down, people bug out and I remember the first time Tellor died. It was like two years ago, so we’re still here.
Mike: Don’t write it out alone, you know. Any more?
Ryan: I think it was the famous Confucius, who said “Prices go up and down, but the teams that build stick around”. Alright. He didn’t say that, I just made it up.
Spuddy: Quickly you pivoted from that.
Question3: Marketing is often badly talked about. Why isn’t a bounty offered to an influencer?
Owen: Is it and influencer who has the flu or a gen z influencer?
Ryan: No, this is just like a flashing influencer.
Spuddy: Owen out of nowhere with a groaner.
Mike: That was good! The knee slapper. Anyway, Spuddy, you were answering.
Spuddy: I saw this question in the discord, I don’t remember who asked it, but it’s the idea that we should have a bounty for an influencer to tweet about TRB, like you know, like a shiller. Somebody who has followers or whatever.
Owen: A positive tweet.
Spuddy: Yeah, theoretically.
Mike: Well, I think the answer is the same. I think this is just something we’ve never as a core team that was managing funds, that we focus on development and other efforts, our stance has always been we don’t want to peel any of that out to give to influencers and play that sort of crypto shilling game. We’ve never done it and I don’t think we’ll start.
Spuddy: It doesn’t look good when projects do that, you know, you lose credibility in the developer community when you do that. I think.
Mike: Yeah, and those influencers will come on their own, if you achieve what you set out to achieve by gaining traction in the space with real users and real developers and so that’s kind of how we prioritize things. And I wouldn’t be, for those of you who still think this is a really good idea, I would question that, because I mean, I don’t think there’s a real correlation that it’s not like the same day, if some shillers want to somehow manipulate a price by buying it up and timing an announcement that they’ve got fed by somebody who paid them. It’s for their benefir, they’re the ones that are going to benefit mostly on it.
Spuddy: I don’t know if you guys actually follow an influencer and look at what they tweet. They might tweet positively about a project for a while, but then if something happens like the team doesn’t want to pay them anymore, then they start tweeting negatively about that project, that happens all the time, so these individuals have a lot of power. They charge a lot of money, more than you would think, they would charge a lot of money. It’s not as clear that it’s a benefit like you would think.
Brenda: And our main goal is to build something that’s going to be lasting and for us to actually create demand for the protocol, we need users. We need to go back to developers, we need to make sure that we’re in their radar and then eventually that demand is going to reflect on the price, but you cannot just artificially increase the price and expect it to just stay there without true demand behind it. If maybe we had a lot more money and we just wanted to, but honestly, I feel like our fundamentals are, we’re here for the long run and we want to do it right in a way that we can all keep our values in check and build something that’s really going to last. Not something that’s going to just benefit a few people. So, I don’t know, I mean, maybe we’ll explore it in the future, but as of now, I feel like that’s really not what we need.
Ryan: Well said.
Question4: The animated explainer is great cinema. Can you put that on the Coinbase, or at least link it?
Mike: Not that I’m aware of. Let me know what you’re seeing, like I don’t trade on coinbase, if there’s something I’m missing. If there’s like a spot under the exchange where you’re buying and selling TRB. If there’s a spot that other projects use, that have links to blog posts or things like that, or information about that project specifically. Let me know, I could look into it if there is an option, but I’m not aware of one. I think what you see, at least on the mobile app, when you scroll down, you just get, there’s like these news links that looks like it has the white paper in the official site. As long as the website is there, that’s the link where people should find the video from. And we can make that more prominent on the website, I think we’re actually making some tweaks to the website right now and we could make that a little bit more prominent on the front page itself. That’s pretty much all people need. They go there, they quickly find the video. I’m glad you like it; we love it too!
Ryan: Yeah, three more great questions.
Mike: Yeah, let us know if you guys want one about the treasury or something like that, or even Tellor Flex, I don’t know if it’s necessary, but if you guys want more of them, let us know. The more you guys demand a specific video, the more we are like, let’s put some money towards it, and get it made.
Will: So, yeah, you might even feel like the beginnings of some of that video integration at the beginning of this one, I don’t know if we’re going to start doing it with this video or future videos, but our new little title sequence.
Mike: Yeah, we’ve animated the little, whether it’s a Tellor tech talk or Tellor community call or Reporter’s call, we have a new little animated title graphic that’ll come in just to add some professional quality to these things, so I hope you like that.
Question5: Missing a special role in discord. There are a handful of people who rock the place, Spuddy great cinema, but you get paid proposal, a bounty, the community votes on who collects it.
Spuddy: I want to know more details about this idea.
Brenda: And just to be clear, Spuddy doesn’t just get paid to be on discord. He has other work, okay?
Mike: But mostly memes.
Spuddy: If all I got paid to do was sit around and make memes all day, they would be some really good memes and I’m not there at all.
Mike: You taught me that these memes have to like, they’re great because you put some thought into it, but they can’t look like you put a lot of time into it. I think it’s a cool idea.
Spuddy: I want to know more about the idea, like what is it, what is the bounty? For like a person who inspires the community to expand?
Brenda: How do we measure?
Spuddy: Everyone who rocks the place?
Ryan: Someone who also got great cinema?
Will: Community member of the month?
Mike: It’s going to be like a subjective lottery, where everybody’s going to subjectively pick the person they think that should get that money, which is going to be themselves yes, and everybody, it’s going to at first, it’ll just degrade into everybody voting for themselves. Oh man.
Ryan: Definitely good idea. Hard ball here.
Question6: Which of you is Tellor Teddy?
Mike: He’s not here.
Ryan: Or is he?
Mike: None of us are Tellor Teddy.
Spuddy: He’s not here, sorry.
Question7: Will there be a CRYPTO.COM listing anytime soon?
Ryan: Aren’t we on crypto.com?
Spuddy: Yes.
Ryan: So, today, right now.
Spuddy: We might not be on crypto.com in all states.
Mike: Yeah, we’ve been on there since, once when we get listed on there, August 2020.
Ryan: Alright, last question.
Question8: While many blockchain networks specialize in specific use cases, Polkadot’s new parachain system can cover the entire spectrum from DeFi, gaming and supply chains to oracles and the internet of things. Now my question, will Polkadot’s parachain influence third-party oracle integrations or Tellor Flex?
Spuddy: Does anybody know what Polkadot is? I don’t know.
Mike: None of us are huge fans of Polkadot, sadly. Sounds like you are though, so keep talking about it, maybe you guys can convince us that that’s a place where we need to go, but we’ve talked to the Polkadot team at some point, really, it’s about if we get a user that’s over on Polkadot that reaches out to us, that like really perks our interest, that’s when we start putting energy and resources towards something like that. We’ll see if that happens. The one place we have seen that which has influenced our opinion of it as a major player was Polygon. It was Matic at first, and then Polygon. You know, compared to all the other ones, it had a lot more, at least back then a lot more clout or a lot more money and resources and they could talk a big game. We just noticed, it was like, what the users are building over on Polygon and it’s not perfect, but that’s where people are going, so there’s something about it and that’s where, that’s why we focus on Polygon first.
Ryan: That’s it for the questions. Real quick, we will have again office hours this Thursday, 2PM eastern time. Had a fun one last week so please join and then we also have tomorrow a reporter call at 11 eastern time. Is that right Owen?
Owen: Let me look at my... Yeah, 11 eastern time.
Brenda: And what are we going to be talking about Owen?
Owen: There’s one; it’s an opportunity for people to bring features that they want with the reporter software, like any major issues, that they’re running into, but tomorrow just kind of talking about how flashbots has helped, if it has and some stats just overall of reporting for the history of Tellor X. That kind of thing.
Brenda: Okay, awesome, so don’t miss it guys.
Ryan: Thanks for joining everybody.
