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Truflation Awarded a $200k Prize by Chainlink and Balaji Srinivasan

April 08, 2022

April 8, 2022, Truflation won a challenge by 1729.com, Balaji Srinivasan, and Chainlink to build the first decentralized and censorship-resistant inflation dashboard.

Truflation designed an alternative method to calculate U.S. inflation and released a free public inflation dashboard. It also put the data on the blockchain and made them available to smart contracts through a decentralized oracle network, Chainlink.

Truflation took the CPI (Consumer Price System) model used worldwide to calculate countries' headline inflation and refurbished it with real-market prices from shops, e-commerce, and large data aggregators.

The resulting inflation rate is often significantly higher than the official numbers:

Whereas CPI is measured based on collecting surveys at the point of purchase (shops) and by calling selected households, Truflation uses real sales prices from shops. It also applies an alternative rent index kindly provided by its partner, Pennsylvania State University, as well as commercial rent indices from Zillow and Trulia.

Truflation's data are also more current and provided daily, allowing users to notice early trends in the main CPI inflation as well as the underlying categories for housing, food, transport, etc.  

Truflation's success in winning the substantial reward has been reported by Zerohedge and Coindesk.