---
title: How to Set Up Tellor as your Oracle
description: A guide to get started with integrating the Tellor oracle into your protocol
author: "Tellor"
lang: en
tags: ["solidity", "smart contracts", "oracles"]
skill: beginner
breadcrumb: Tellor oracle
published: 2021-06-29
source: Tellor Docs
sourceUrl: https://docs.tellor.io/tellor/
---

Pop Quiz: Your protocol is just about finished, but it needs an oracle to get access to offchain data...What do you do?

## (Soft) Prerequisites {#soft-prerequisites}

This post aims to make accessing an oracle feed as simple and straightforward as possible. That said, we're assuming the following about your coding skill-level to focus on the oracle aspect.

Assumptions:

- you can navigate a terminal
- you have npm installed
- you know how to use npm to manage dependencies

Tellor is a live and open-sourced oracle ready for implementation. This beginner's guide is here to showcase the ease with which one can get up and running with Tellor, providing your project with a fully decentralized and censorship-resistant oracle.

## Overview {#overview}

Tellor is an oracle system where parties can request the value of an offchain data point (e.g., BTC/USD) and reporters compete to add this value to an onchain data-bank, accessible by all Ethereum smart contracts. The inputs to this data-bank are secured by a network of staked reporters. Tellor utilizes crypto-economic incentive mechanisms, rewarding honest data submissions by reporters and punishing bad actors through the issuance of Tellor’s token, Tributes (TRB), and a dispute mechanism.

In this tutorial we'll go over:

- Setting up the initial toolkit you'll need to get up and running.
- Walk through a simple example.
- List out testnet addresses of networks you currently can test Tellor on.

## UsingTellor {#usingtellor}

The first thing you'll want to do is install the basic tools necessary for using Tellor as your oracle. Use [this package](https://github.com/tellor-io/usingtellor) to install the Tellor User Contracts:

`npm install usingtellor`

Once installed this will allow your contracts to inherit the functions from the contract 'UsingTellor'.

Great! Now that you've got the tools ready, let's go through a simple exercise where we retrieve the bitcoin price:

### BTC/USD Example {#btcusd-example}

Inherit the UsingTellor contract, passing the Tellor address as a constructor argument:

Here's an example:

```solidity
import "usingtellor/contracts/UsingTellor.sol";

contract PriceContract is UsingTellor {
  uint256 public btcPrice;

 //This Contract now has access to all functions in UsingTellor

constructor(address payable _tellorAddress) UsingTellor(_tellorAddress) public {}

function setBtcPrice() public {
    bytes memory _b = abi.encode("SpotPrice",abi.encode("btc","usd"));
    bytes32 _queryId = keccak256(_b);

    uint256 _timestamp;
    bytes _value;

    (_value, _timestamp) = getDataBefore(_queryId, block.timestamp - 15 minutes);

    btcPrice = abi.decode(_value,(uint256));
  }
}
```

For a complete list of contract addresses refer [here](https://docs.tellor.io/tellor/the-basics/contracts-reference).

For ease of use, the UsingTellor repo comes with a version of the [Tellor Playground](https://github.com/tellor-io/TellorPlayground) contract for easier integration. See [here](https://github.com/tellor-io/sampleUsingTellor#tellor-playground) for a list of helpful functions.

For a more robust implementation of the Tellor oracle, check out the full list of available functions [here](https://github.com/tellor-io/usingtellor/blob/master/README.md).