Nicholas Fett, Brenda Loya and Michael Zemrose, the co-founders of Tellor, are used to explaining their cryptocurrency business to people who don’t understand it. For people who don’t live and breathe crypto, blockchains and smart contracts, Tellor’s business model might sound abstract.
But Tellor is a unique player in the crypto world and is being recognized for it. Just two weeks ago, the cryptocurrency was listed on Coinbase, the leading app for buying and trading crypto.
Cryptocurrency is digital currency that keeps records of all of its transactions in a decentralized system and has become increasingly popular in the last few years.
Tellor launched in 2019 at the Frederick Innovative Technology Center, Inc. (FITCI) incubator and has since grown in size and scope. The three co-founders began expanding last September and have hired about nine employees from around the world.
“A lot of work can be remote … but we like to come in here. As you can see, we have a bit of an office culture that keeps us going,” Zemrose said, referring to the office’s three guitars, two violins, one banjo and speaker system.
The startup likes to defy the traditional cryptocurrency startup culture where it can. As of late, crypto startups have earned bad reputations due to scams.
“If you get a couple millionaires together and they make your website look amazing and put all this marketing budget into it … they can raise a hundred million dollars in a night. And these projects did,” Zemrose said. “Then they can essentially run away with that money and never have to deliver on anything.”
Tellor wants to be the opposite kind of business by offering a service funded by their crypto.
Coinbase.com describes Tellor as a decentralized oracle network that allows smart contracts on Ethereum — a technology that’s home to digital money, global payments and applications — to securely connect to external data sources. TRB is an Ethereum token that powers the Tellor network and incentivizes honest reporting of external data.
In the crypto world, when two parties enter into a smart contract, they set a condition that must be met for one side to “win” or “lose.” The smart contract helps mitigate risk.
An example Fett gives is a betting contract on what the weather will be on a specific day. The problem is that the contract itself cannot determine what the weather actually was, Fett says. That information has to come from elsewhere and be put “on chain” — or encrypted onto a blockchain.
“Obviously, like I could just tell it [the answer], but since I’m a person, I can be bribed. I could be really biased … ,” Fett said. “So that’s the beauty of the blockchain is you need a decentralized way, some way that it’s going to get this information without ever being shut down. That’s the service that we provide.”
Instead of promising increased value, Tellor is standing out by actually doing something with its crypto, having a goal in mind and providing information for its users.
Tellor may not have been an overnight success like some other cryptos that tout millionaire investors, but it’s slowly gained popularity. There was about $200 million worth of Tellor being circulated as of May 2021. Fett, Loya and Zemrose have recently hired Shaun Loetterle as their community outreach manager to help expand Tellor’s network of users. They keep in regular communication through a Telegram chat and a Discord server.
“The fact that something that we could do gets that kind of traction and that much global [attention]… it’s really cool,” Fett said. “We have people reach out to us, and they’re from all over the world, and they’ve heard of Tellor.”
Fett, Loya and Zemrose eventually hope to leave their jobs at Tellor and let it run as a decentralized financial network. The popular Bitcoin, for example, is not run by any executives but instead a community.
“The team that created it was slowly sort of overtaken by just open source contributors and people like that,” Fett said. “So eventually we’ll know if we’re actually successful in this if [we can leave].”
“It’s this new way of collectively building something whether it’s a company … or a small club or a group of freelancers,” Zemrose said. “You can organize through crypto and through voting and incentives.”
Immediately, though, the group hopes to find some more local employees, specifically young developers, and keep building up their community.
“Even though we went through those rough times, keeping our integrity, and then getting to where we are now, it’s really amazing,” Loya said. “And I think that is what I’m most proud of. Things come and go, but your integrity doesn’t.”
Follow Erika Riley on Twitter: @ej_riley