Tellor

About Tellor (TRB)

What Is Tellor (TRB)?

Tellor is a decentralized oracle protocol that lets smart contracts obtain data that does not exist on-chain, such as asset prices, and it now runs as its own Layer 1 blockchain purpose-built for reaching consensus on subjective data. Anyone can request a value by tipping it, anyone who stakes TRB can report values, and anyone can dispute a value they believe is wrong. TRB, short for Tellor Tributes, is the native asset used for staking, tipping, dispute fees and voting.

The distinguishing idea is that Tellor is deliberately permissionless and adversarial rather than curated. There is no whitelist of approved data providers. Reporters put capital at risk instead, and a public dispute and slashing game is what makes lying expensive.

Official sources:

• Tellor
• Tellor documentation and whitepaper
• Tellor on GitHub
• TRB token on Etherscan

Who Founded Tellor? (History)

Tellor was founded by Brenda Loya, Nick Fett and Michael Zemrose, who had previously worked together on Daxia, an Ethereum derivatives project. Building derivatives made the oracle problem impossible to avoid, and Tellor was the result of pivoting toward that dependency rather than around it.

The first Tellor oracle deployed on Ethereum in August 2019, using a Proof-of-Work style competition in which miners raced to submit values. Mining was later replaced with a staking model, and in 2025 the project launched Tellor Layer, a sovereign Cosmos SDK chain with the identifier tellor-1. The Ethereum TRB contract remains the canonical token contract, with the two linked by a two-way bridge.

How Tellor Works

The reporting cycle is short and repeats continuously:

1. A query is tipped Any user pays a tip in TRB against a query identifier, for example a BTC/USD price feed. The tip opens a reporting window, and tips arriving inside that window are added to the pot for the round.

2. Staked reporters submit values Reporters read data from real-world sources and submit answers into an array of submissions. Blocks target roughly two seconds, and an official value takes a minimum of three blocks: one for the tip, then reporting, then aggregation.

3. Submissions are aggregated by stake weight Every query carries an aggregation type, such as median or mode. At the end of the window the submissions are combined using weighted aggregation, so larger reporters contribute proportionally more to the final value. Tips are then split by weighted contribution.

4. Anyone can dispute Disputes run entirely on-chain, and successful disputers take the majority of the slashed amount. That reward is what keeps independent monitors watching.

To keep feeds fresh without constant tipping, the protocol maintains a cycle list of enshrined queries. Reporters work through that list so there is baseline reporting even in quiet periods, and inflationary rewards, known as time-based rewards, are only available on cycle list queries.

Key Ecosystem Components

• Tellor Layer, the Cosmos SDK chain where reporting, aggregation, disputes and rewards all happen
• Validators, capped at 100, who produce blocks and sign aggregated data before it is relayed elsewhere
• Reporters, who are uncapped, submit values and can be delegated to by TRB holders known as selectors
• Light client bridge contracts, deployed on each consuming chain so Tellor data can be verified against the validator set
• The two-way TRB token bridge between Ethereum and Tellor Layer, plus permissionless relayers

Splitting validators from reporters is deliberate. Tendermint-style validator sets have to stay small so bridging signature verification stays cheap, but the data provider set should be as wide as possible, so the two roles are delegated separately.

TRB Token Utility

TRB is the native currency of the chain, and its tokenomics are hardcoded rather than governed. Its roles are:

• Staking, which qualifies an address to report and exposes it to slashing
• Tipping, which is how users pay for a specific data point to be produced
• Dispute fees, posted at 1, 5 or 100 percent of a reporter's stake depending on whether the accusation is a warning, a minor infraction or a major infraction
• Voting on dispute outcomes, with power split evenly across users who tip, reporters and the team

Issuance is fixed by design. Four thousand tokens per month go to the team as a development share, and an equivalent amount is distributed as time-based rewards, 75 percent to reporters and 25 percent to validators. Gas fees go to the block proposer.

What Makes Tellor Unique?

Three properties stand out. The protocol is built to keep producing data even if the team disappears, because requesting, reporting and disputing are all permissionless. Disputes are a public wager rather than an appeal to an authority: censoring a reporter by disputing them costs real money if you are wrong. And Tellor consistently chooses security over speed, with a 21-day unstaking period, a further 12-hour wait on withdrawals to Ethereum, and bridge caps of 20 percent of the bridge balance inbound and 5 percent outbound per 12 hours.

How Tellor Differs from Similar Oracles

Compared with the more widely used oracle networks:

• Most large oracle networks rely on a curated set of professional node operators. Tellor's reporter set is open to anyone willing to stake, which trades some latency and polish for censorship resistance.
• Push-based oracles publish on a schedule or on a deviation threshold. Tellor is tip-driven, so data is produced when someone pays for it, with the cycle list providing a floor.
• Many oracles resolve incorrect data through off-chain governance or operator replacement. Tellor resolves it through on-chain slashing that pays the person who caught it.
• Tellor can serve arbitrary subjective data, not only price feeds, because a query is just an identifier plus an aggregation rule.

The trade-off is that a permissionless reporter set produces data with more variance in freshness, and consuming contracts are expected to build in their own validation, delays or fallbacks.

Use Cases of Tellor

• Price feeds for lending markets, stablecoins, perpetuals and other collateralized systems
• Settlement data for prediction markets and event-driven contracts
• Cross-chain data delivery, where a light client bridge verifies validator signatures on a destination chain
• Custom or long-tail data that curated oracle networks will not list, since any query can be defined and tipped
• Fallback oracles layered underneath a primary feed for redundancy

How Tellor Is Secured

Security comes from staked capital plus a dispute market. A stake is tied to the reporter rather than to a specific submitted value, so a bad report can still be slashed days later. Disputes escrow both the fee and the potential slash, then stakeholders vote for up to two days, with a one-day window in which the dispute can be reopened for another round. Each round burns half of a 5 percent cut of the dispute fee and distributes the rest to voters, and the fee doubles each round to discourage spam.

Bridge security is handled separately. Data proofs and validator set updates require signatures from at least two-thirds of the last known validator set, the set is re-signed whenever it changes by 5 percent, and a light client that has gone more than 21 days without an update is treated as stale. As a circuit breaker, anyone who suspects the chain has been compromised can propose pausing the token bridge by posting 10,000 TRB, which is burned if the pause is approved.

Risks and Considerations

• Data quality depends on how many reporters actively cover a given query. A thinly covered feed is weaker than a well-covered one, and consumers should check coverage rather than assume it.
• The security model assumes someone is watching. If no one runs a monitor and disputes bad values, slashing never triggers.
• Deliberate delays, including the 21-day unbonding period and bridge withdrawal waits, are a security feature but a real constraint for anyone who needs fast exits.
• Cross-chain delivery introduces bridge and relayer assumptions on top of the chain's own security.
• Cost of capture falls as total staked value falls, so the safety margin is tied to how much stake is committed.
• Contracts that read Tellor data without their own validation, fallback or freshness checks inherit more risk than the protocol intends.

Why Tellor Matters

Oracles are the point where blockchains meet the outside world, which makes them one of the most concentrated sources of systemic risk in decentralized finance. Tellor matters because it argues that the answer is not a better-vetted committee but a market where reporting is open, mistakes are punishable by anyone, and the protocol survives its own team walking away. Moving from a set of contracts on Ethereum to a sovereign chain also consolidated staking, disputes and bridging under one security budget rather than fragmenting them per deployment.

Where Can You Buy Tellor (TRB)?

TRB is listed on many centralized exchanges and is available on decentralized exchanges on Ethereum and on the networks where a TRB representation is deployed, including Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Gnosis Chain and others. Availability and pairs vary by jurisdiction.

Major Centralized Exchanges (CEX)

TRB is commonly available on:

• Binance
• Coinbase
• KuCoin
• OKX
• Bybit

Pairs such as TRB/USDT and TRB/USD are typical where supported.

Storage Options After Purchase

• Custodial storage on an exchange
• Any Ethereum-compatible non-custodial wallet for the ERC-20 TRB contract
• A Cosmos-compatible wallet such as Keplr for TRB held natively on Tellor Layer
• Hardware wallets paired with compatible wallet software

Because TRB exists both as an ERC-20 and as the native asset of Tellor Layer, confirm which representation and which network you are sending to before any deposit or withdrawal.

Related Coins

Compare TRB with other oracle and data networks on Coinrithm:

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