What is TELOS?

Telos is a decentralized blockchain ecosystem that includes the Telos EVM, which is proven to be the fastest Ethereum Virtual Machine globally, and its high-speed consensus layer, Telos Zero. With its continued focus on helping drive global adoption of Zero Knowledge technology, Telos is also currently developing a hardware-accelerated Ethereum Layer 2 network, powered by SNARKtor, with the goal of improving privacy and scalability for cases of large-scale global use. Telos is overseen by the Telos Foundation, a non-owner foundation dedicated to advancing the Telos blockchain network and its community.

The Telos project began its development in 2018, when a group of developers and community members EOS, began working on a fork of this well-known blockchain, in order to revitalize its development. At this point, it is worth noting that unlike many projects in the crypto space, Telos did not hold an ICO (Initial Coin Offering) for its launch. Instead, it opted for a fair token distribution, reflecting its commitment to decentralization and fairness from the beginning.

The end result of all these efforts is the initial launch of Telos, whose mainnet began operating on December 12, 2018.. Since then, Telos has been evolving significantly, maximizing its capabilities. In fact, in 2022, with the arrival of the Antelope project (a community version of EOSIO), Telos was one of the first blockchains to support and develop this community solution and take advantage of its new capabilities to continue evolving as a project.

An ambitious project

The Telos developers are very clear about the objectives to be achieved with their project, objectives among which stand out:

1. Provide a scalable and high-performance blockchain platform. This thanks to the use of technology Antelope, derived from EOSIO, blockchain construction base with a high level of scalability.
2. Offer extremely low and predictable transaction fees. And thanks to its high scalability, operations on Telos are very economical, which helps make it very accessible to its users, even at times of high on-chain activity.
3. Implement robust and transparent governance. The Telos developers and community have taken advantage of past lessons to deploy a powerful governance platform, allowing to maintain high decentralization in the development and evolution of the project.
4. Be a sustainable and energy efficient platform. Thanks to the use of the DPoS – Antelope consensus protocol, Telos offers a fast, economical and highly energy efficient blockchain. In fact, with a smaller number of nodes running, Telos can offer a much higher level of scalability than networks like Ethereum (including some of its Layer2, such as Polygon or Arbitrum).
5. A stable and secure platform. Telos has been developed with great care and this can be seen in the fact that the network has maintained an impressive 100% uptime, without experiencing interruptions, forks or outages. This achievement underscores the robustness and reliability of the Telos infrastructure.
6. Offer support for Ethereum through your own Virtual Machine (EVM). Telos developers are looking to offer strong support for Ethereum to enable rapid migration of applications between Ethereum and Telos. Projects like TelosEVM are a perfect example of this.

General operation of Telos

Telos works using a unique architecture that combines two main components: Telos Zero and Telos EVM. This structure allows Telos to offer the best of both worlds: the high performance and flexibility of its native chain, and compatibility with the Ethereum ecosystem.

On the other hand, another of the fundamental pieces of Telos can be seen in what is known as the Antelope consensus protocol, which is an advanced implementation of Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) combined with Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT). This consensus protocol offers several advantages to Telos, including:

1. High speed: Telos can process transactions in 0.5 second blocks.
2. Quick purpose: Transactions are considered final in approximately 2 minutes.
3. Energy efficiency: DPoS consensus consumes much less energy than Proof of Work (PoW).
4. Security: The protocol is resistant to 51% attacks and other forms of manipulation.

Antelope works as a system where $TLOS token holders vote for block producers. These producers are chosen by vote and, in total, the 21 producers with the most votes are chosen, who are rotated in each new production season.

Once chosen, active block producers take turns producing blocks within the Telos network every 0,5 seconds, with each block produced must be confirmed by at least 15 of the 21 producers to be considered valid. Once validated, the produced block must go through a total of 252 confirmations (about 126 seconds) to consider that the block is irreversible and that the transactions are final.

Designed for high performance

This structure allows Telos to maintain high performance and scalability, while remaining decentralized and secure. And we can see this in the capabilities of the network, among which we can highlight:

1. Transaction speed. Telos is capable of processing up to 15.200 transactions per second (TPS).
2. Block time. Telos block time is 0,5 seconds.
3. Transaction Purpose. A user who issues a transaction on Telos will be able to see that the network validates their transaction in a few seconds (it is included in a block), but the completion and irreversibility of the transaction takes approximately 2 minutes (e.g. in Bitcoin it takes about 60 minutes and in Ethereum about 15 minutes).
4. Fixed and low rates. Gas fees on Telos are predictable and significantly lower than on Ethereum.
5. No frontrunning. The Telos architecture prevents transaction frontrunning. This is due to binding rules for block producers, fast block speed, fixed transaction costs, and the absence of a public mempool.
6. Sustainability Telos consumes much less energy than PoW-based blockchains.

Telos EVM, providing advanced smart contracts to Telos

Telos, being a derivative of EOSIO (now Antelope), has advanced smart contract capabilities. In networks like EOS, for example, dApps can be generated using programming languages ​​such as C/C++, which makes the dApps work very quickly, and high-speed native applications can be generated, thanks to the fact that these languages ​​are very efficient.

However, at Telos they have decided to create their own smart contract structure (based on Telos Zero) that takes advantage of the existing developer community around the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and for this they have developed the Telos EVM. Telos EVM is an implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) that runs as a smart contract on the Telos base chain (Telos Zero). This innovative architecture allows Telos to offer full compatibility with Ethereum, while maintaining the performance and cost advantages of its native chain.

Among the main features of Telos EVM, the following stand out:

1. Great compatibility with Ethereum. Telos EVM can run smart contracts written in Solidity or Vyper without modifications.
2. RPC supported. It implements a JSON-RPC specification identical to that of Ethereum, making it easy to integrate with existing tools and libraries.
3. Fixed gas rates. Unlike Ethereum, gas fees on Telos EVM are fixed and predictable.
4. High speed. Leverages the speed of the Telos base chain to deliver fast transactions.
5. Low cost. Transaction fees are significantly lower than on Ethereum.

Thanks to Telos EVM, developers can deploy their smart contracts on Telos as they would on Ethereum. Without the need to significantly alter the contracts, and without interrupting the line of operation of the decentralized applications facing the user. That is, users interact with these contracts using Ethereum-compatible wallets (e.g. MetaMask), but all operations are processed by the Telos EVM smart contract on the base chain.

This architecture allows Telos to offer an experience similar to Ethereum, but with greater speed and lower cost, making it ideal for DeFi applications, blockchain games, and other use cases that require high transaction frequency.

Currently, there are two development efforts to take the capabilities of Telos EVM to a new level. The first is known as SNARKTor. This is a joint project between Telos and Cardano (IOHK) to improve the scalability and privacy of the Telos EVM. This first project seeks to implement cryptographic tests of the type ZK-snarks to provide greater security, speed and privacy to operations within the Telos EVM.

The second project is the Telos zkEVM, a project that draws on the lessons learned from SNARKTor, but seeks to implement an EVM in hardware in order to boost network performance considerably.

At the moment, both projects are in development, but they demonstrate once again the commitment of the Telos community to providing secure, fast, economical and scalable solutions to its users.

Telos Zero, a Layer 0 to build

As we already mentioned, Telos Zero is the native base layer of the Telos blockchain. This foundation is built on a highly optimized and customized implementation of Antelope (formerly EOSIO) software. The idea of ​​Telos Zero is to provide the fundamental infrastructure on which the entire Telos ecosystem is built, including Telos EVM.

Thanks to its heritage with Antelope, Telos Zero offers a series of unique features among which we highlight:

1. High performance. Designed to handle thousands of transactions per second.
2. Flexibility. It supports smart contracts written in C++, allowing low-level optimizations for high-performance applications. This is inherited from EOSIO, since this blockchain development framework provides these capabilities.
3. Resource system. Telos Zero uses a resource model based on CPU, NET, and RAM, rather than gas fees.
4. On-chain governance. Incorporate governance mechanisms directly into the chain.

At this point, Telos Zero can be seen as a blockchain of its own, with truly unique capabilities. For example, developers can create smart contracts in C/C++ and compile them to WebAssembly (WASM). This allows the generation of very fast decentralized applications that can be integrated into different platforms, from IoT, smart devices, or to generate Web3 experiences with very high speed and scalability.

$TLOS token and its tokenomics

The native token of the Telos network is $TLOS, this token plays a fundamental role in the functioning and economics of the Telos network. Among the utilities of the $TLOS token we can mention:

1. Governance: $TLOS holders can vote on governance proposals and to elect block producers.
2. Gas fees: In Telos EVM, $TLOS is used to pay gas fees for transactions.
3. System Resources: In Telos Zero, $TLOS is used to obtain network resources (CPU, NET, RAM).
4. Staking: Users can stake their tokens to earn rewards and participate in network security.
5. Medium of exchange: $TELOS can be used as a currency within the Telos ecosystem.

In addition to this, the fact that Telos had a unique and fair initial distribution is notable. This means that there was no ICO or pre-sale. Furthermore, the tokens were distributed based on a snapshot of the EOS network.

Another important point in this distribution is that a hard limit of $40.000 $TLOS per account was set to avoid token concentration and only about 5,2% of the total supply was allocated to the approximately 150 contributors who helped build and launch the grid. This distribution ensured that there were no large investors or “whales” that could dominate the network from the beginning.

Supply and issue

The initial supply of $TLOS is approximately 355 million TLOS (with a total issuance of 420 million $TLOS), to this is added an annual issuance of 5% inflation that serves for staking rewards and ecosystem development.

Another important point is that Telos implements a token burning mechanism for transaction fees on the Telos EVM, which helps control inflation and potentially make $TLOS deflationary in the long term. Additionally, $TLOS holders can stake their tokens to earn rewards. These rewards are distributed automatically every 30 minutes, providing a continuous incentive to hold tokens and participate in the network.

This tokenomics is designed to encourage long-term participation, reward active users, and maintain a healthy and well-distributed token supply.

Use cases for Telos and its technologies

Telos, with its unique architecture combining Telos Zero and Telos EVM, offers a versatile platform for a wide range of decentralized applications. Here we explore some of the main use cases and how Telos technologies make them possible:

1. Decentralized Finance (DeFi): Telos is an ideal platform for DeFi applications due to its high speed and low fees.
2. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs): Telos supports the creation and trading of NFTs, which can be used to represent ownership of unique digital assets such as art, collectibles, and in-game items.
3. Games: Telos offers a high-performance, low-cost platform for creating and deploying blockchain-based games, which can benefit from the transparency, security, and immutability of blockchain.
4. Social Media: Telos can be used to build decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to censorship and data breaches, and that give users more control over their data and privacy.

Overall, Telos is a versatile and powerful blockchain network that can support a wide range of use cases and dApps, and is well suited for building the decentralized applications of the future.