Truebit, the biggest crypto project you’ve never heard of..

With countless tokens in the crypto realm, it’s sometimes the case that a “serious” project with massive potential slips through the net and goes unnoticed. Imagine if the same project shunned any offical marketing, and stealth-launched its token without fanfare or celebration. Also consider that the project in question “does not engage in exchange listings”. Truebit is a dark horse that’s been flying under the radar for some time.

90% of Crypto is hype — most projects have never generated any revenue, and most valuations are completely speculative. Some tokens struggle to justify their existence and have no real use in their ecosystem. But they continue to pump, circulating through the arteries of social media until they are eventually filtered out by reality. Or they stick around and linger like relics, hoarded by a faithful group of advocates. Truebit is in an odd position — as a project it’s been around since 2017, but its token, TRU (not to be confused with Truefi, TRU) only launched in May 2021. So is it a relic of a bygone age, or is it one of the many “shiny new things” that have exploded onto the scene in 2021. In this article I’m going to attempt to work out what Truebit is, and whether it’s worth investing in.

What is Truebit Protocol?

Truebit Protocol is complex, and relatively hard to explain without delving into fundamental blockchain issues. We’ll leave discussions about Gas limits, the Verifiers Dilemma etc to another time, and focus on what Truebit is. In one sentence, Truebit is a “scalable verification solution for blockchains”.

“Truebit is a blockchain enhancement which enables smart contracts to securely perform complex computations in standard programming languages at reduced gas costs.”

It’s effectively an Oracle that allows complex computational tasks to take place off the main chain.

What are Truebit’s Key Selling Points?

• Cost — Truebit reduces Gas Fees
• Security — Truebit offers greater security for large computational tasks
• Blockchain agnostic — Truebit is primarily focused on the Ethereum Blockchain, but works on other Networks.
• Can work with other level 1 & 2 scaling solutions
• Post-quantum secure and SEC compliant
• Open source community, potentially enabling widespread AI & machine learning adoption.

Truebit Use Cases:

Truebit has a number of potential uses cases. Here are some of the more obvious ones:

• De-centralised video streaming (verifying output of transcoding tasks)
• Machine learning and AI
• Plasma — child-chain error reconciliation
• Accounting & Book-keeping
• Managing healthcare records
• Automating Insurance
• On chain cryptography
• Federated Learning

Truebit Personnel

Unfortunately, Truebit’s website does not list team members / developers working on the protocol. It appears to be a very private organisation, with a small number of developers and other loose associations / contributors.

Truebit was founded by Fullbright Fellow & mathematician, Jason Teutsch, and computer scientist, Dr Christian Reitweissner. For those of you who haven’t heard of Christian, he’s the creator of the Ethereum Smart Contract language, Solidity, which powers the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Christian currently works as a team lead at Ethereum. Crunchbase currently lists only two employees at Truebit — Sami Makela (Core Developer) and Jason Teutsch (Founder).

What’s Vitalik Buterin’s association with Truebit?

Jason Teutsch co-wrote a Whitepaper with Vitalik called “Interactive Coin Offerings” in 2017. Although not directly involved in Truebit, Vitalic appears to be a supporter of the protocol:

More recently, in May 2021, Vitalik again made reference to Truebit when talking about Optimistic Rollups. If you’re technically minded, you can read what Vitalic said here.

Truebit Investors / Backers

Truebit is a PolyChain Capital backed company. Polychain Capital manages a hedge fund “which invests in a diversified portfolio of blockchain tokens”. Other projects in their portfolio include DFINITY, Maker DAO, Mir Protocol, Parsec Finance, Terra, and Zilliqa (to name but a few). Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase and Managing Partner of Paradigm is reported to have been an early investor of Truebit

“TrueBit looks like a natural solution for scaling computation on Ethereum, despite the ’96 throwback site”. Fred Ehrsam

Truebit Partners / Synergies

• Polygon (MATIC)
• Ocean Protocol
• Livepeer
• Ethereum Foundation (loose association)

Competitors

Blockchain scaling has been an issue for a long time, so it’s no surprise there have been other’s working on possible solutions. Here are some of the competitors.

• Optimism — Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) providing “optimistic rollup” scaling solutions to Ethereum.
• Arbitrum — Another L2 Ethereum Scaling solution using “transaction rollups”
• Golem — A de-centralised marketplace for computing power focusing on probabilistic verification.
• Cartesi — “Descartes executes massive computational tasks off-chain, on a Linux virtual machine fully specified by a smart contract.”
• Nahmii — “Nahmii leverages patent-pending state pool technology which gives unprecedented scalability.”
• iExec — “The First Decentralized Marketplace for Cloud Resources”.

It’s worth noting that although these scaling solutions are competing with Truebit, each offers something slightly different.

Truebit Tokenomics

Don’t worry if you’re struggling to understand the above diagram. What you need to know is the TRU token is an essential part of the protocol, that pays verifiers and also allows the protocol to be deployed on other blockchains. If Truebit gains wide adoption, the TRU token will be in demand. People wishing to use it will either buy it on the open market / liquidity pools, or they will mint their own tokens on the operating system. Whenever new tokens are minted, the price to mint increases. I thought I’d include this full and highly detailed video of Truebit’s tokenomics and price mechanisms, as it explains it better than I can detail here.

Truebit (TRU) Price Action

All time high (ATH) of $1.31 was achieved shortly after the launch of the TRU token on 2nd May. Since then the token value has fallen to a low of $0.18 on 21st of July, before recovering some ground with the rest of the market to the current price of $0.38.

Truebit is a complex scaling solution that can be utilised by most blockchains to achieve greater computational power / scaling. Truebit is a project that’s been around for over four years, although the token only recently came onto the scene in May 2021. Despite some big backers (Polychain Capital / Paradigm / Fred Ehrsam) and some big names (Christian Reitweissner & Vitalic Buterin) associated with the project, it’s still relatively unknown. This is because the project has completely shunned any form of marketing, and is not seeking exchange listings.

Despite being complex, the tokenomics behind the Truebit Protocol seem attractive, especially if the price of ETH continues to appreciate. But the main driver will be adoption, so if projects choose to implement other scaling solutions rather than Truebit Protocol, we could have a still birth on our hands. But it’s early days, and despite Truebit ignoring YouTube influencers and the rest of the “moon boy” token shillers, some channels are starting to talk about the project positively.

Would I personally invest in Truebit? Unlike the other recent projects I’ve written about such as Illuvium and HAPI, Truebit is harder to evaluate. If it takes-off, it has the potential for a massive ROI. But that’s a big if. My major concern is that this project appears to be being built by an incredibly small team of computer scientists / mathematicians, with business considerations secondary (if considered at all). I’m well aware of the old adage “word of mouth is the best form of advertising”, but there needs to be a critical mass for that to hold-true, which may require some marketing and community engagement. My biggest hope for the project is that Polychain Capital put a business development team behind them to drive adoption and increase awareness. An exchange listing would be beneficial, but not as necessary as greater transparency and willingness to engage. I will most likely buy a small amount of TRU, as it seems under-priced at the moment (it’s trading well below the mint price). Whether I continue to dollar-cost-average into the project will depend on access to development information and adoption announcements.

Source: https://medium.com/gasworks-news/truebit-the-biggest-crypto-project-youve-never-heard-of-512717e5e061?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency