When designing secure systems, it is best to treat your oracle as just a single component of a much broader risk model, rather than relying on it as your entire security perimeter. This cautious approach is essential because data manipulation exploits do not discriminate between different oracle types, having successfully targeted both centralized and decentralized feeds in the past.

To help mitigate these industry-wide vulnerabilities, Tellor is designed to make attacks substantially more expensive to carry out. The protocol achieves this heightened level of defense through its permissionless participation model alongside a strict staking and slashing mechanism. At the same time, Tellor ensures that users retain complete flexibility in deciding exactly how they wish to consume their data.