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About Nicholas Fett

Nicholas Fett (often credited as Nick Fett) is an economist, software developer and blockchain entrepreneur best known for co-founding Tellor, a decentralized oracle protocol that enables smart contracts to request and receive externally sourced data without relying on a single centralized provider. He serves as Tellor's Chief Technology Officer and has helped shape both the protocol's technical architecture and its crypto-economic incentive design. Before entering crypto full time around 2017, Fett worked as an economist in the U.S. public sector, including at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where his work focused on derivatives markets, market structure and regulatory analysis. That economics and market-structure background informs Tellor's reliance on economic incentives — staking, rewards and disputes — rather than trusted intermediaries to secure off-chain data. In 2026 Fett also published the book Unstoppable Markets: Financialization, Neutrality, and the Limits of Decentralization, a critical insider examination of crypto market design, financialization and the limits of decentralization.

Projects Founded

Tellor

Career Timeline

Early Career

Worked as an economist at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Department of Labor), conducting data-driven economic research including seasonal adjustment work on major economic indicators.

CFTC

Served as an economist at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, conducting research on derivatives markets and regulatory analysis. Co-authored CFTC research on stop orders in select futures markets. (He was an economist/researcher, not a Commissioner or political appointee.)

2017

Left his public-sector economics work to enter the cryptocurrency industry full time, initially publishing commentary on Bitcoin futures, institutional investors and crypto market structure.

2018–2019

Co-founded Tellor with Brenda Loya and Michael Zemrose. The project grew out of an earlier venture (daxia.us) aimed at building decentralized prediction and data markets. Tellor launched in 2019 as a permissionless oracle protocol on Ethereum.

2019–2020

Served as CTO of Tellor as the protocol gained traction in DeFi, providing oracle feeds for lending, stablecoin and synthetic-asset use cases. The native token TRB (Tellor Tributes) underpinned reporter staking, disputes and governance.

2021

Tellor underwent a major protocol evolution (Tellor X) following the discovery of a critical vulnerability in an earlier version, resulting in a protocol upgrade and token migration. The team coordinated a community upgrade rather than presenting the event as a routine feature release.

2021–2024

Led Tellor's expansion beyond a single Ethereum deployment toward multi-chain oracle infrastructure, supporting data requests and reporter participation across additional networks.

2025–2026

Helped lead the development and rollout of Tellor Layer, a broader decentralized data network. In 2026 Tellor announced that reporter rewards had fully transitioned to Tellor Layer.

2026

Published Unstoppable Markets: Financialization, Neutrality, and the Limits of Decentralization (Unstoppable Press), a critical examination of crypto financialization, market neutrality and the practical limits of decentralization.

August 2026

Continues as CTO & Co-Founder of Tellor, focused on Tellor Layer, oracle infrastructure, protocol economics and crypto policy research, alongside promotion of Unstoppable Markets.

Key Contributions

Tellor

Co-founded the decentralized oracle protocol and serves as its CTO, helping build permissionless data-reporting infrastructure for smart contracts.

Oracle Infrastructure

Helped build censorship-resistant data-reporting systems that allow smart contracts to consume off-chain data without relying on a single centralized provider.

Crypto-Economic Design

Applied economic incentives, staking and dispute mechanisms to decentralized data verification, drawing on his economics and derivatives-regulation background.

Tellor Layer

Helped lead Tellor's evolution from an Ethereum oracle contract toward a broader decentralized data network, with reporter rewards transitioning to Tellor Layer in 2026.