Welcome to the 9th instalment of the Pythiad, the Pyth network newsletter!
To our followers: thank you for all your support and good vibes! And to our newcomers, we say welcome.
We are delighted to have you on board. As always, there’s much to discuss.
Coming Up
- Pyth Developments
- Pyth End-Users
- Pyth Publishers
- Pyth Metrics
- Pythian Community
Pyth Developments
Solana Cookbook
The Solana Cookbook is a developer resource that provides the essential concepts and references for building applications on Solana. Each concept and reference focus on specific aspects of Solana’s development while providing additional details and usage examples.
Pyth is the second integration available in the Solana Cookbook (alongside Project Serum). Give it a read for an easy Pyth integration!
Pyth EMA
In addition to the ‘streaming’ price of an asset, the Pyth network offers applications a Pyth EMA price to further enable use cases. For example, Pyth’s averaging method is a variation of an Exponential Moving Average (EMA).
We chose EMA over an SMA because its computational efficiency is a good fit for on-chain applications. However, a basic EMA does not account for confidence intervals or missing data. Therefore, the current Pyth averaging method is a slot-weighted, inverse confidence-weighted exponential moving average of the aggregate price.
You can explore more in our dedicated blog post and documentation.
Pyth Client in Golang
Creating an entirely new market data referential — thanks to previously untapped composite market data — is just the beginning for Pyth!
Pyth’s next steps are to make this data widely available for all.
The first batch of libraries released was composed of Rust, JavaScript, and Python clients. Since then, incredible community builders have stepped up and carved new territory.
Richard Patel from Blockdaemon introduced a new library in Golang. The pyth-go library allows developers to access Pyth’s high-quality market data in near real-time from Golang applications. In addition, an open-source monitoring solution for fellow data publishers (or data hoarders and quant traders) is included. Check out Richard’s thread to see all the tooling he released!
Don’t forget the pyth-neon library, which provides a drop-in oracle replacement for Ethereum applications migrating to Solana!
As the Pyth.SolNet library, brought to you by Hoak!
Will you be the next heroic contributor? Whatever your journey, we all start with the docs.
New Feeds
Most platforms cannot support that specific asset without an oracle price reference. Pyth network will not stand for such a world!
Throughout March, the network has added three new feeds, with more to come:
$C98 is the native token of Coin98, which was founded as a DeFi product builder to create and develop an ecosystem of DeFi protocols, Web3 applications, and NFTs on different blockchains. Coin98 is continually looking for new methods to innovate products and expand its network. $C98 serves many functions, such as allowing holders to earn a portion of transaction fees, giving them membership discounts for products and services, and rewarding them for staking cryptocurrency.
$NEAR is the native token of the NEAR protocol: a sharded, proof-of-stake, layer-one blockchain that’s simple to use, secure, and scalable. NEAR has experienced significant traction in the past few months, and we expect to see DeFi protocols leveraging the NEAR/USD Pyth product as an oracle index in their perpetual protocols. Deploying a NEAR feed (and perhaps more feeds from the NEAR ecosystem itself) is just a first step. One day, you might just find your favorite Pyth feeds made available in the NEAR ecosystem too!
$FTM is Fantom’s native token, which currently sits in the top 50 crypto assets in market capitalization. Fantom is a high-performance, scalable, and secure smart-contract platform designed to overcome the limitations of previous generation blockchain platforms. Wormhole already supports Fantom, much like how Pyth supports $FTM. You know how the story goes…
Here’s a secret for our closest readers. If you want to figure out what the next supported feeds are, just take a look at our markets on testnet or devnet…
Pyth Users
Pyth data is natively available on Solana. Accordingly, Pyth’s data is permissionlessly queryable (no paywall exists on the blockchain).** If you are using Pyth data, we will not know unless you tell us. So if you want us to help you and broadcast your protocol or companies on our website, all is here.
Ribbon Finance
Ribbon Finance is an Ethereum-native protocol that creates structured crypto products for decentralized finance and is currently a leading ecosystem player with ~$230M in TVL. (Structured products are packaged financial instruments that use a combination of derivatives to achieve some specific risk-return objective).
Ribbon is expanding to Solana and, in partnership with Zeta Markets, is leveraging the Zeta FLEX program to automatically settle their vaults on Solana with Pyth’s price feeds.
Friktion
Friktion introduces an Automated Portfolio Manager (APM) into the DeFi ecosystem, offering active and passive strategies known as Volts. The APM provides a set of profit opportunities for users, finding ways to maximize returns while capturing volatility yield in various market environments. Starting with options and non-linear products, Friktion aims to offer sustainable sources of yield and bring risk management into the ecosystem!
Friktion leverages the Pyth to determine the settlement price of options at their expiry. Within crypto, most settlement options are derived from a 30-minute TWAP; thus, Friktion collects Pythd data live before generating their ‘own’ 30-min TWAP.
Since Friktion go-live on Solana, they generated more than $1B in options volume and currently gather over $100M in total value locked.
DFlow Protocol
DFlow, the first order flow markets protocol on Solana, is built to replace legacy payment for order flow systems with new market mechanisms that provably safeguard retail traders and enable new DeFi market-making strategies.
As market makers fill order flow, their fill prices must be within a governable threshold of the best available absolute price (determined by Pyth!), where the threshold is a function of market volatility and liquidity.
Apricot
Apricot is a next-gen lending protocol that supports leveraged yield farming on Solana. Apricot’s mission is to help users maximize yield while protecting their downsides with Apricot Assist.
With over $110M in TVL, Apricot is among Solana’s leading borrow-lending platforms and looks forward to strengthening its lending operations.
Hubble
Hubble is leveraging Pyth price feeds to enable users to borrow and mint $USDH, Hubble’s algorithmic stablecoin, with crypto assets.
Borrowing $USDH allows users to access the liquidity (cash on hand) in their long-term holding assets through zero-interest borrowing. Hubble has gathered $30M+ in TVL and looks to grow through a $USDH expansion on platforms like Solend, Port Finance, Apricot, Mango Markets, Zeta Markets…
Everlend
Everlend is a decentralized meta-lending protocol with a built-in money market and yield/loan aggregator. The Alpha Version of Everlend is now live on Solana mainnet.
Everlend aims to continuously provide users with the best yields and interest rates available. Everlend uses Pyth’s on-chain price data for assets to correctly identify the value of collateral and liquidity loans.
HXRO Network
The HXRO Network released its Dexterity whitepaper presenting a collection of smart contracts that enables a fully decentralized liquidity, risk, and margining primitive system on Solana.
Dexterity is the DeFi first protocol with built-in support for complex and straightforward spread products, enabling exchange-supported spread markets.
Catch up on the Pyth x HXRO Twitter Space here.
Crux
Crux is a cloud-based data integration platform specializing in external data and has been implementing Pyth price feeds in their platform to easily offer Pyth data to Crux users!
Pyth is the first on-chain crypto supplier on Crux, an exciting development for blockchain and a testament to Pyth data quality.
01 Exchange
01 Exchange has just released one of the most anticipated products on Solana and beyond: Power Perpetuals! SQUOL (or Squared SOL) aims to offer a better experience and unique upside (compared to traditional leverage) thanks to the squared asset curve’s exponential and positive convexity. 01 leverages the Pyth feeds by squaring the Pyth price to generate the index price on which the funding rate is calculated.
Citrus
Earlier this year, Citrus launched the testing release of its lending and borrowing protocol, becoming among the first protocols to provide utility and yield to Wormhole-wrapped assets on Solana. In addition, citrus has integrated the Pyth price feeds to power any actions on the borrow-lending platform, and we both look forward to 2022 as the year to go cross-chain! Pyth to deliver data on other chains and Citrus to offer a complete cross-chain lending platform.
Pyth Publishers
Publisher Milestone
March has been another productive and perhaps even monumental month, as we welcomed seven new data providers to Pyth, helping the network officially surpass 50. Fifty! The top trading firms, exchanges, and crypto players unite to support Pyth and build a more fantastic future for DeFi and Web3. We want to take this opportunity to express our immense gratitude for this growing and dynamic community. Believe it or not, this is still just the beginning, and we cannot wait to welcome more first-party data providers, many of which will soon be announced, and for others interested, you know where to find us. The journey to building a decentralized and self-sustainable marketplace of institutional grade, high-fidelity financial data, continues.
New Publishers
Who are the newest additions to the growing Pythian community from March?
Amberdata
- Amberdata delivers comprehensive data and insights into blockchain networks, crypto markets, and decentralized finance, as well as empowers financial institutions with data for research, trading, risk, analytics, reporting, and compliance.
- Existing partners of Amberdata are LMAX, Coinbase, Kraken, Bitfinex and Binance among others.
ML Tech
- ML Tech was founded in 2020 in Chicago, Illinois, by Leo Mindyuk (CEO) and Markus Leballeux (CTO).
- ML Tech allows researchers to test and execute their strategies with institutional investors looking for novel strategies to deploy their capital.
- In 2021, ML Tech’s monthly trading volume grew 57 times: from $42M to $2.4B.
Wintermute
- Wintermute is a proprietary trading firm in digital assets, active across over 60 centralized and decentralized exchanges, with daily volumes over $5bn.
- The firm facilitates OTC trading in spot and derivatives for over 250 tokens.
- Being a very active player in the blockchain ecosystem, Wintermute supports several high-profile blockchain projects with investment, integrations, co-development, and partnerships.
- Wintermute was founded in 2017 by Optiver alumni, where CEO Evgeny Gaevoy was head of ETF market making.
Raydium
- Raydium was among the first AMMs to go live on Solana in early 2021. Since then, Raydium has established itself as the Solana leading AMM with about $600M of Total Value Locked and over $43B in volume traded.
- Currently, 35 trading pairs on Raydium have over $2.5M in liquidity and 60 over $1M.
Optiver
- With 35+ years of global market-making experience, the firm was founded by Johann Kaemingk in 1986 as an options market maker on the European Options Exchange (known as Euronext).
- As a market maker, Optiver trades derivatives, cash equities, bonds, forex, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
Kaiko
- Kaiko was founded in 2014 to become the foundation of the new digital finance economy by serving as a single source for market information from both centralized and decentralized marketplaces.
- Kaiko collects data from over 100 centralized and decentralized exchanges, makes 100 million API calls per week, and supports +120,000 spot, futures, and options data points.
Aquanow
- Aquanow is a leading infrastructure and liquidity provider that enables institutional and enterprise use-cases for digital assets.
- Each month, billions pass through the platform enabling a broad range of financial services for the world’s fastest-growing financial institutions, fintech platforms, and global companies.
Geneva Trading
- Geneva Trading is a leading principal trading firm with a history of consistent success in the derivatives markets. Founded in 1999, the firm fosters an environment of innovation, entrepreneurship, and a disciplined approach to trading and investing.
- With offices in Chicago and Dublin, the firm prides itself in having core foundational pillars of prominent businesses in trading, market-making, and risk management.
You can always review the full roster of data publishers on the Pyth website here.
Pyth Metrics
Total Value Secured
One of the most important metrics is the Total Value Secured (TVS) by the Pyth’s price feeds. Price feeds are crucial for your operations, whether you are a borrow-lending protocol or a synthetics platform.
At the end of March 2022, Pyth feeds were securing about $2B!
Pyth data is natively available on Solana and (therefore) permissionlessly queryable. We may not be aware of every single program leveraging Pyth!
When possible, smart contracts are verified in-depth to confirm whether they’re using Pyth data. This is part of running fair assessments. But otherwise, if you are using Pyth data, let us know! We are happy to support and broadcast you on the Pyth website!
Trading Volume
Consider the amount of trading volume dependent on Pyth data. Each protocol has its Pyth integration: perpetual contracts using a CLOB or a vAMM use Pyth as their index reference to set the funding rate. Synthetics platforms use Pyth price feeds as the exchange rate basis for swaps in between synthetic assets. Finally, futures or options protocols (specifically DOVs) integrate Pyth feeds for their derivatives settlement.
To date, Pyth has enabled over $3.7B in volume traded.
Publishers
Data is king, and the Pyth network stands committed to onboarding only high-quality data sources and establishing a natural bridge — without intermediaries — between these sources and the end-users.
The Pyth network currently has 53 publishers!
NPM & Rust Downloads
Pyth network is open-sourced, and its data is freely queryable.
You can check Pyth’s adoption rate by looking at NPM and Rust downloads.
NPM (“Node Package Manager”) is the default package manager for JavaScript’s runtime Node.js, which is needed whenever you want to integrate Pyth on your website frontend.
A (Rust) crate is a binary or library. The crate root is a source file that the Rust compiler starts from and makes up the root module of your crate. This enables you to call on-chain data and make your protocol works.
Pyth in 2022 seems to be taking on an ‘up only’ trend…
Pyth Community
The Pyth community knows no borders!
NYC Solana Hacker House
Since day 1, we have been building Pyth in the open. By this ethos, Pyth’s contributors are no strangers to hacker houses.
Did you catch us at the NYC Solana Hacker House earlier this month (Mar 14–18)?
We had the pleasure of meeting the builders among you at the Solana Bootcamp (Mar 7–11) too, a six-day offline event with in-person guidance and mentorship from Solana Labs engineers and Wormhole, Jump Crypto, Multicoin Capital!
FIA-PTG Conference
At the same time, the Pyth network was also on-site for the FIA Principal Traders Group Conference in Boca Raton, Florida (Mar 15–17) as a Platinum sponsor. Other Platinum sponsors included Pyth contributors: DRW Cumberland, FTX, and Jump!
This is the first major ‘post-pandemic’ TradFi conference, and it’s long overdue! There was lots of excitement, and we had a wonderful time connecting with current and prospective Pyth supporters! Word on the street: a new data publisher revealed its future participation in Pyth live on stage…
For a recap of the conference, we recommend The Block article by Frank Chaparro.
Avalanche Summit
Pyth was also present at the first Avalanche Summit in Barcelona, Spain (Mar 22–27). It was a great success with over 1,000 participants. We cannot wait to deliver the Pyth data to this fast-growing blockchain (ranked 4th in TVL with $12B).
Many of you caught Mike Cahill, the Pyth Data Association Director on the On-Chain Data Deep Dive panel! Surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly), another panelist — Tongtong Gong, COO of Amberdata — is also a Pyth network contributor!
Several other Pyth mentions were made in both Kanav Karyia’s (President of Jump Crypto) Keynote and Hendrik Hofstadt, Director of Wormhole Foundation and Director of Special Projects at Jump.
Chicago Terra Hacker House
Mark this down in your calendar! You won’t want to miss the month-long Hacker House in Chicago hosted by Jump Crypto, Terra, Delphi Digital, and Hashed.
Starting from April 25th, you can join and help build the future of DeFi on Terra. And who knows — maybe Pyth data will already be live on Terra…
More details here.
Twitter Spaces
March has seen a constant flow of Twitter Spaces with users of Pyth data! Don’t worry; we’ve got recordings:
- MarginFi x Pyth — MarginFi is a decentralized portfolio margining protocol for trading on Solana.
- Jet Protocol x Pyth — Jet is a decentralized borrow-lending protocol that is about to start its governance journey.
- 01 Exchange x Pyth — 01 is a decentralized exchange built on Solana offering perpetual and Power Perpetuals (squared perpetuals).
- The Ship Show — A Twitter Space Talk Show led by Jump welcomed Mike Cahill, Director of the Pyth Data Association, and Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin Capital.
- Apricot x Pyth — Apricot is a next-gen lending protocol that supports leveraged yield farming on Solana.
- Hubble x Pyth — Hubble is a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol built on Solana that currently offers no-interest loans by minting a specific stablecoin (USDH).
- Figment x Acumen x Pyth — As contributors and partners, Figment will be working closely with the Pyth network participants to bring more functionality and usability to the Pyth HiFi market data. Acumen leverages DeFi to bridge crypto and traditional assets to democratize access to capital globally.
- DeltaFi x Pyth — DeltaFi is a decentralized, fully on-chain automated market maker (AMM) swap exchange built on Solana.
- Syndica x Zebec x Pyth — Syndica aims to offer scalable infrastructure for Solana and web3. Zebec is a continuous settlement protocol built on Solana.
New Telegram Communities
With the Pyth network receiving greater interest worldwide, it only felt normal to kickstart the localization of community chatrooms. The Turkish, Vietnamese, French, and Korean channels were open in March, so join us! And don’t forget about our Chinese Community too!
In addition to the new French Telegram channel, we had the chance to get a Journal du Coin video on the Pyth network! Non-french speakers do not worry as we plan to release this video shortly in English.
Discord Art Contest
The Pythians have shown a deep interest and proficiency in art creation for the past year, and we sincerely love to see it and do it with you. In March, the event that united all Pythians was the Clairvoyance (the supposed faculty of perceiving things or events in the future) contest. The overall theme was Crystal Balls x Divination, and without further ado, we are stoked to reveal the winner: crazzelino🔮 (or crazzelino#8272)!
If you like drawing, painting, meming, or taking quizzes be sure to join us in our Discord to partake in those events and have a chance to win some prizes.
This is the end of Pythiad #9!
We can’t wait to hear what you think! You can join the Pyth Discord and Telegram, follow us on Twitter, and be the first to hear about what’s new in the Pyth ecosystem through our newsletter. You can also learn more about Pyth here.
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