Launch of Pyth Ecosystem Grants Program

Today marks the launch of the Pyth Ecosystem Grants Program by Pyth Data Association, with 50M in PYTH grants being made available to eligible community members.

This grants program aims to encourage community members to share their ideas and insights about the Pyth Network with the wider Web3 community and contribute to its development through educational and research initiatives.

The program will have three categories. Each category focuses on a different goal for the development and expansion of the Pyth Network.

The program will oversee the distribution of PYTH Tokens to applicants. These Tokens come from the Ecosystem Growth tokenomics category of the supply. All three categories will distribute grants of both unlocked and locked Tokens.

The Purpose of the Ecosystem Grants

Pyth Network is enabling a new generation of decentralized finance. By opening access to low-latency, high-frequency, and high-fidelity price data to developers everywhere, Pyth makes high throughput on-chain applications possible for the first time. Today, Pyth Network powers more than 350 applications across over 55 blockchains and has facilitated over $400 billion in traded volume.

Pyth Network is operated by the Pyth DAO, following a decentralized governance model to enable its diverse stakeholders and contributors to collectively shape the network to better serve the DeFi space. In a decentralized network, thoughtful incentives can encourage stakeholders to contribute to protocol development, educate new people about the technology, and inspire new contributors to take part.

For these reasons, Pyth Data Association is launching the Pyth Ecosystem Grants Program. The program offers three categories of grants: Community Grants, Research Grants, and Developer Grants. The purpose of these grants is to empower the Web3 community to create educational content about Pyth and foster a welcoming, entrepreneurial community; conduct research to improve the Pyth oracle and encourage adoption; and build new tooling and use cases for the Pyth protocol. It is worth noting that this grants program by the Pyth Data Association does not preclude the potential for a separate grants program managed by the Pyth DAO.

The grants program will oversee the distribution of grants of either unlocked or locked PYTH tokens to participants of any category. All grants in the program come from the Ecosystem Growth category of the PYTH Token supply.

The Ecosystem Growth tokenomics category, which comprises the majority of the total supply, is set aside for incentivizing research to advance the Pyth protocol, guiding the creation of complementary tooling and infrastructure, and supporting educational initiatives about the Pyth Network. These initiatives span community members who contribute to the network as education partners, researchers, developers, data providers, and more.

Community Grants

The Pyth Network community is diverse and covers 55+ chains. This is because Pyth is designed to scale rapidly to new ecosystems and new data feeds to serve developers, wherever they choose to build. Over the years, the Pyth community has welcomed founders, builders, and users from EVM, Solana, Move, Cosmos, Bitcoin, and more. The multi-cultural and multi-chain nature of the Pyth community paves the way for a unique social dynamic that can foster innovative ideas, cross-chain collaborations, and a welcome environment for onboarding the next million Web3 participants.

Community Grants will be used to foster an entrepreneurial, inclusive, and passionate community space for all Pyth Network participants. These grants can guide individuals to co-create unique and interesting content, engage in constructive discussions and social activities, and collaborate on educational, entertaining, or productive grassroots initiatives.

In the long-run, a vibrant and thoughtful community dynamic can play an important role in helping spread awareness of the Pyth Network, educating new community members, and establishing a welcoming, inclusive environment for participants to realize their full potential within the network.

Commmunity members can learn more about Community Grants (also known as Impact Awards) in the Pyth Ecosystem Grants page and the Grants channel in the Pyth Discord.

Research Grants

Today, hundreds of protocols rely on Pyth Price Feeds, Benchmarks, and Entropy. There are over 500 price feeds updating at sub-second speeds on the Pythnet appchain. Benchmarks provides standardized, historical prices for precise settlements and chart visualizations. Entropy offers a reliable source of randomness for creative and financial services.

Pyth Network was founded on applied research and thoughtful approaches towards innovating in the blockchain space. The protocol’s mechanisms benefit from continuous analysis and iteration. Developers, application users, and other participants of the Pyth Network often hold valuable insights into new features, upgrades, and improvements to the ecosystem.

Research Grants are designed to facilitate the exploration of new network features, areas of improvement, and productive insights for improving the Pyth offerings.

This category will focus on researchers and subject matter experts. The structure of these grants will be bounty-based.

Eligible participants will most likely include the following skillsets, although this list is not exhaustive:

• Quantitative and data-driven research.
• Blockchain infrastructure development.
• Proven community and educational leadership.
• High-quality content creation.
• Demonstrable Web3 business and commercial expertise.

New Research bounties will be listed in the Pyth Research and Developer Bounties board.

Developer Grants

Pyth Network has ushered in an era of decentralized finance that was not possible before. On-chain perpetual markets, structured products and derivatives platforms, and high-performant AMMs rely on Pyth’s low-latency and high-resolution prices. To date, over 350 protocols use Pyth for their mission-critical services.

While there has been constant innovation in the capabilities of on-chain applications, the total number of active users is still dwarfed by the Web2 world: Web3 is still early in the adoption cycle. Opportunities to transform the paradigm of finance abound. Pyth Network was therefore founded to power and enable the next generation of entrepreneurs seeking to disrupt and rebuild the financial markets.

Developer Grants will focus on incentivizing the creation of new tooling to support the protocol’s operations, innovative integrations with the Pyth products, and other valuable development contributions to the network. The structure of these grants will be bounty-based.

Eligible participants will likely possess the following skillsets, though this list is not exhaustive:

• Proficiency in blockchain infrastructure or protocol development.
• Experience in building and optimizing network infrastructure.
• Familiarity with DevOps practices and automation tools.
• Familiarity with quantitative and data-driven approaches.

New Developer bounties will be listed in the Pyth Research and Developer Bounties board.

Closing Remarks

Every contribution helps shape the network's trajectory and spearhead new advancements for the wider DeFi ecosystem secured by Pyth. For this reason, Pyth Data Association has launched the Pyth Ecosystem Grants Program to guide ecosystem members toward development, research, and community initiatives to expand and grow the oracle network. 50M PYTH Tokens will be made available through Community, Research, and Developer Grants. Please see the Pyth Ecosystem Grants page for more information.

We want to hear your feedback. Join the Pyth Discord and Telegram, and follow Pyth on X and LinkedIn. You can also learn more about Pyth here.