Pyth Network Mainnet Launch

Today marks the launch of the Pyth Network and Pyth Price Feeds on Solana mainnet.

Just 140 days after our Hello World moment, we are finally making our first-party, high-fidelity data — directly sourced from some of the biggest players in the financial world — open for usage and available to builders looking to create the dApps that will power the future of finance.

More than four months ago, we announced our goal: bringing HiFi market data to DeFi.

We believe that our goal is very ambitious because financial market data is sufficiently unique: there are very few available sources, and those sources have very tightly controlled distribution. In addition, an oracle network needs to be able to combine such latency-sensitive data in way that optimizes not only accuracy but increases security as well given how dependent many blockchain applications are on the accuracy of this type of data.

And today the Pyth Network is a vision coming to life! One that imagines the world of decentralized finance gaining comprehensive access to high-fidelity financial market data.

If you want to review the whole process from the introduction of the Pyth Network to today, we urge you to take some time and read our first two editions of the Pythiad: a monthly newsletter covering the comprehensively the network activity. Pythiad #1 and Pythiad #2.

As of today, the Pyth network already offers coverage of or 30+ assets ranging from cryptocurrencies, equities, and commodities, to foreign currencies — with much more in the pipeline in order to offer to any dApps a high quality streaming price.

To discover all our assets, be sure to check out our markets page, and enjoy the sub-second price update latency with our live charts replaying data available on Solana mainnet.

The current assets supported by Pyth are all sourced from known entities across the globe — with the full list of announced participants available here — that provide to the network quotes every 400ms!

Many more are currently onboarded in order to further strengthen the reliability of the network output — the Pyth Network can currently accept up to 32 individual providers per asset — without at any point compromising on the data quality which is paramount for any oracle aiming to power financial dApps.

On the data provider roster, we’d like to emphasize Virtu, Hudson River Trading, Cumberland, CTC, and Jump Trading Group… which collectively represent a large portion of the trading volume executed on a daily basis in US equities. We also have data from US registered exchanges that grant us a streaming access to the NBBO on various assets. Similarly, on the cryptocurrency markets, we are glad to have welcomed LMAX & FTX — a top 5 worldwide crypto exchange that has been growing exponentially — with many more to come.

Below is the full list of our announced data providers since our Roadmap update earlier in April.

Offering far more than just a HiFi streaming price from, the Pyth Network introduced a “confidence value” to further empower dApps in their comprehension and utilization of market data.

The confidence value can quickly be understood as a function of where trades could be expected to occur at a given time for a particular asset. This value will vary according to each asset & its market structure but mainly it allows the Pyth Network to combine multiple independent observations of the same thing in a more “optimal” way, by giving more weight to observations with smaller uncertainty and less weight to observations with greater uncertainty.

To delve deeper, you can review our medium article on the topic as well as see how Zeta Markets, an upcoming decentralized option protocol, is creating a brand new product with this confidence value: Zeta thread and Pyth thread.

TL;DR: Zeta’s binary options settle to half their payout for both longs and shorts if the strike is within this uncertainty interval. This allows us to provide tradeable, short-term products whilst preventing the risk of random price disagreements close to expiry!

Looking back on our journey, it has been a great one. Initially, the Pyth network planned phase one to only support a few asset classes which includes US Equities and cryptocurrencies. As of today, however, we have supported not only US equities and cryptocurrencies, but also foreign exchange pairs (FX) and commodities (metals), though we have not officially entered the second phase of our expansion plan just yet.

With the way things are progressing on the data provider side, we also tried our best to push the number of blockchains that will support the Pyth Network as a data oracle. In our roadmap, phase 1 will mainly cover the development of the Pyth Network on Solana, Ethereum and Terra. As of now, we can proudly say that we are supporting more than just those three layer-1 blockchains, with the addition of support for Binance Smart Chain (BSC).

Thus, to summarise, here is a quick checklist of what we have accomplished within the last four months:

• US Equities, Crypto ✔
• Price and Confidence Interval ✔
• Market Status Signals ✔
• TWAPs ✔
• Advanced Aggregation Method ✔
• Data Providers Partnerships ✔
• DeFi Protocol Integrations ✔

Mainnet has been one of the biggest milestones in our roadmap to date, and thus far we have exceeded our initial expectations not only on data providers, but also on the development side. Alas, looking into the future we are still very determined to bring as many notable data providers into the ecosystem as possible, while also keep adding more layer-1 blockchains and assets support. Here are some of our notable milestones for phase two (after mainnet):

• More Data Providers
• More DeFi protocols and other applications consuming Pyth Network data
• More Layer-1 blockchain supports
• Publication of additional documentation of the Pyth Network (Lite Paper and White Paper)
• Introduce staking, rewards, and other functionalities

Moving forward, the community will also be a big part of what we are trying to build. As a first-party financial data oracle, we wish to educate as many community members as possible about what our expansion plans are and how we are going to accomplish those. As a result, there will be more emphasis on building the awareness of the Pyth Network through various outlets, including podcasts, and other events.

Builders, come discover where the magic happens! Check out the documentation.

DeFitizens, if you would like to see examples of live applications powered by Pyth Price Feeds, take a look at:

• Bonfida Perps (on-chain perpetuals)
• Port Finance (borrow/lending)
• Solend (borrow/lending)

If you have any questions, reach out in Discord or Telegram .

We can’t wait to hear what you think! You can join the Pyth Discord and Telegram, and follow us on Twitter. You can also learn more about Pyth here.

EDIT: January 31, 2024: This blog post was edited to reflect the facts of the newest whitepaper.