Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC6W184mn-A&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/
Main focus on flashbots, but also a small de-tour on the potential of Tellor Flex reporting.
Whole discussion
Owen: Welcome to the giant crowd here, to the reporter meetup number two. Basically, I’m just going to be going over some updates with flashbots and then Tally or whoever else can add anything else that they need. I’ll go next slide. There it is. Basically, right now, you can use, you can submit transactions through flashbots, it’s just going to require a little bit more setup than the regular reporter. You can use the branch that is currently in development. There’s no official release right now. Mainly because it’s been mostly me testing it and I would like other people to test it before we do an official release. Right now, if you do use flashbots, there are some cons as well. The good thing is that if you submit a transaction and it fails, you don’t lose transaction fees. Basically, the flashbots relay, what you’re submitting, your bundle of transactions due, will just reject it and you’ll get notified on the console. That’s the good. Also, you know, people were, they would submit, their transaction would be accepted and then someone else would essentially front-run them and get the reward and they would have to pay the transaction fees as well. That doesn’t happen either. When you do use flashbots, don’t expect this to be like a cure-all. This is not. You use flashbots and all of a sudden, you’re making stacks. The reason for that I think, could be other reasons, a bunch of people have been using flashbots already and the way it works is you need to create another account that’s used as your signature with the flashbots relay and you build reputation with that signature. So, the people who have already been submitting, they’ve been building up a reputation, so you submit, you know at a certain gas price, they might submit lower and there’s, if you submit a certain tip and they submit one that’s lower, they still might get mined before you. It’s rough, but you can also look forward to, in the beginning you know, there wasn’t many people submitting with flashbots and I think a similar thing might happen too when we go to Tellor Flex. Some of the bigger players and whatnot, it might take them a little bit of time to get everything in order before they’re beating everyone, so there might be the opportunity to make a bit of cash when we go to Polygon and things like that. That’s sort of this analogy, that somebody has used in the past, that some of the bigger players are like, these big ships where it’s harder to stop them once they get going, but they are slow to turn. Smaller players are faster to maneuver and whatnot. So, that’s basically it for flashbots, if you are interested, I can put out a video of exactly how to set this up, but you know, the release is coming soon. Once we get more people to test it. That’s about it from me.
Nick: If I can ask, how do you get reputation and how fast does it sort of scale up? Do you have any idea?
Owen: That’s the annoying part. So, to get reputation, if you are just trying to submit a value regularly out of profits, you’re probably not going to get mined initially, because someone with a higher reputation is going to submit before you. Then you can’t build reputation. I have literally had to submit at a loss to build reputation and still it’s not perfect. Every time I submit, it’s not like those bundles are mine. So, that’s the way that you build reputation as you submit transactions to them and you can’t like, if you submit, just like a simple transfer transaction to another one of your accounts and whatnot, they will just send that to the regular memphial. They won’t even mind that.
Nick: Yeah, but you said, I mean, in the future, we were talking about this earlier, there could be potentials for, you could use somebody else’s relay, you were saying?
Owen: Yeah, that’s possible, I just don’t know if that’s even beneficial for us to do. Like releasing open-source software. Potentially, for anyone listening, you could check out and maybe you could start beating a bunch of people if you check out miningDAO, they have a relay that you can submit to. I don’t know exactly how it works, I haven’t investigated it and then also there’s another, I believe it’s mintX, is another relay and the way their... Theirs is different, so miningDAO, they literally have a bunch of miners, so it’s like their own flashbots essentially, but the mintX one, if that’s the name, they essentially submit to the flashbots relay. So, it’s them who’ve already built up a gnarly amount of reputation and so that’s why theirs theoretically works. I haven’t tested it either.
Nick: I wonder if we could build a relayer for Tellor.
Owen: Possibly.
Nick: Owen is like, I don’t want to do this.
Owen: I mean, I just don’t, you’d have to think through it and see if it was a good idea even. Because using these things, I told you about it and now if a bunch of people start to use it, I don’t know the benefit might start to go away. So, it’s just, that’s how these things go sort of. I don’t really...
Nick: I mean, that would be like a prisoner’s dilemma in a way; if we all use it, there’s like no point to using it. And wasted a bunch of work.
Owen: Yeah, basically now, theoretically, someone who can, will go use miningDAO or this mintX relay and they’ll be able to submit profitably for a while maybe. But then as soon as we have released the official one, that supports those things, then it’s like sorry, and now it is a gas auction again.
Nick: Sure. Well, no, this is super cool. Thank you for putting this together. I’m super curious to see how it just plays out. Basically, you should get to a point where there’s no profit. As soon as there is a profit, somebody will submit even for a dollar and you get really efficient at doing that.
Owen: Or like you’re saying at a negative profit, because you were like, yeah you know.
Nick: I mean, we submit every night for, you know, we support the AmpleForth value, right now. And we have to make sure that it’s through right around 7:30 at night, so we submit it either way, whether there’s a profit or a loss, so we’re clearing out the time-based reward regardless. We don’t even care if we make a profit and that’s I think, you’ll start seeing some more people do that and the more people that actually do that, the less time-based reward will actually be there for people competing for it. So, there’s like that downside as well, but yeah, it’s super interesting and we’re actually working with alpha, for some of you reporters, you can reach out. We’re going to be uploading things to Polygon and we’re going to be start pushing some values at the end of next month to Polygon and what we’ll actually be doing is setting up service agreements. So, like this was somebody else’s idea, they want the price of what does he want; he wants I think Matic/USD and then like USD updated every five minutes on Polygon. So, he just wants to stream you money, so you’ll be one of the reporters that is required to keep those prices updated and you’re streamed money until they’re not. There will be different sort of setups like that. So, stay tuned for some of those, we’ll probably be reaching out in the public channel for people to volunteer and get set up.
Owen: That would be super cool to get a bunch of the active community members, like to be the ones for sure in those contracts.
Spuddy: Seems like the Polygon projects want to set up all kinds of experimental figures.
Tally: I think on Polygon, not only would be more flexible, but I think it also opens the opportunity to have less competitive, more cooperative reporting agreements, which I think would really benefit small reporters in such a way that main-net Tellor can’t support. If it can’t support it.
Nick: I mean, it’s just a different game on Polygon. It’s, everything is so cheap that you can experiment and play around with, and you’re not paying $500 to deploy a contract. If it doesn’t work, just scratch it and everybody move over.
Tally: Most expensive part is the bridging, which could be like 50 times more expensive than everything else you do off the bat.
Nick: Well, we’re working, super alpha, we’re working with a project who’s going to do batch bridging. So, right now I was experimenting with it last week, you should be able to bridge to Polygon for like five bucks. Because it’ll just be more, the analogy is more like a fairy to, where you know, now if you an individual transfer over to Polygon, that’s, you actually have to send a transaction on main-net Ethereum, which costs a whole bunch of money, but this one, you’ll just like bundle a whole bunch of off-chain transactions, they’ll put it into one big transaction and then you’ll split the costs to go over. It can make it a lot cheaper, so it’ll just be slower, but it’ll be a cool idea. You can bridge your TRB over to Polygon for $5, that would make it way better.
Tally: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think, I guess for competing for time-based rewards, we’ve got like 71 reporters, and then one time-based reward. So, it’s a very tough competition off the bat, but I think, things to look forward to, for sure, there’ll be more people tip as Tellor grows and an ecosystem. More people will be tipping on main-net to provide more opportunities to more places to compete, more rewards to compete for, and then further we have a lot of attention lined up on Polygon. So, I think it’ll be really exciting to see how that evolves and I think give the flexibility of Tellor Flex, which is open-source and on GitHub, feel free to look at it, and do look at it. I think the opportunities there to provide more modular, for reporting, we’ll really open the doors for the small fish that have a hard time competing with flashbots, mega programmers.
Nick: So, when can we expect the next Telliot release?
Owen: I don’t want to give an exact date.
Nick: Within the next week or within the next month?
Owen: Not next month, next week probably.
Nick: Alright, cool. So, anybody have any questions or?
Tally: What’s the timeline for Tellor Flex?
Nick: Tellor Flex will be up testing on Polygon next week and then we’ll be deploying the contract the following week, so mid-January. And then we’ll be sort of obviously, once you put it up, there’s not like anybody using it right away, but it’ll probably be early February that we’ll get, so we have a few projects looking to switch over. It’ll probably be early February that they switch over, so looking good. Well, thanks everyone for coming. Owen, awesome job. Super interesting stuff, you should make a tweet thread and then we can all like it and pass it around because this is... even on the reputation. I don’t think a lot of people, who even follow flashbots know about that.
Spuddy: You’re talking about cutting edge crypto stuff.
Nick: Somebody who’s actually run flashbots and submitted a transaction, there’s like people who know about flashbots and then people who have submitted with flashbots.
Spuddy: I was going to say, I think that it’s great to work on this and open-source it for reporters to use and try it, and you know even if people just have enough coding knowledge like tweak it a little bit and use it. Giving people the tools is always better than saying oh, the big guys are going to do it. We can try to decentralize it as much as possible by helping people out.
Owen: On that note, anyone who’s watching this later, continue to let us know, improvements in the reporters and dev channel and any questions you have.
Nick: Cool, see you all later.
