Where Pyth is Now | Q1 2023

Last October, the Pyth Network made a bold declaration: that Pyth is going cross-chain, with a longer-term vision to become a fully self-sustaining, decentralized oracle network as envisioned in the whitepaper.

One quarter into 2023, and the results speak for themselves. Industry leaders from more than 18 blockchains trust and rely on Pyth prices for their operations, from Synthetix on Optimism to Ribbon Finance on Ethereum, CAP Finance on Arbitrum to Deri Trade on BNB Chain. Even TradingView themselves, an off-chain and massively popular charting tool, is plugged into Pyth data!

It’s been a fruitful Q1, and a lot of hard work for the Pyth community over the past six months. It can be dizzying keeping up with the network’s breakneck growth.

We’re writing to give everyone comprehensive recap, and comment on some interesting trends in DeFi, before wrapping up with Pyth’s governance progress and sharing some exciting community events…

What is Pyth

Some readers may be new to the Pyth Network. If so, welcome! Pyth delivers real-time market data to 15+ blockchains. Pyth supports 230+ price feeds across crypto, equities, FX pairs, and commodities, sourced from some of the biggest exchanges and market makers.

Pyth is unique among oracles in that it sources all of its data from institutional, first-party sources like CBOE, Jane Street, TwoSigma, Binance, OKX, and Bybit. In contrast, legacy oracle designs require smart contract developers to pay intermediary nodes for the service of scraping data from third-party sources like CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap.

The critical assumption with legacy models is that all Web2 data is free and you simply need to incentivize nodes to scrape it. Pyth’s assumption is that the data owners should be compensated appropriately for the usage of their proprietary data.

The Pyth Network’s mission is to deliver data that the blockchain community can trust. When robust, cutting-edge infrastructure is in place, a nascent industry like decentralized finance can experience a second phase of explosive growth. After the vicissitudes of 2022, a paradigm shift for blockchain is long overdue.

How it Started, How it’s Going

Pyth V1: Solana Price Feeds

Pyth had its beginnings in Solana. On August 26, 2021, the Pyth Network launched into mainnet with 25 data providers supplying their proprietary price data to the Pyth on-chain program on Solana with a little more than 40 price feeds.

Growth was rapid. By March 2022, Pyth secured over 90% of Solana’s value and supported over $3.7B in total trading volume, demonstrating clear and overwhelming demand for Pyth data. The network welcomed onboard more than 50 data providers, offered almost 60 price feeds, and had generated approximately 10M daily market updates in those 6 months—an unthinkable feat for blockchain. The world started taking notice.

Motivations for Supporting a Multi-Chain World

As the crypto ecosystem began evolving in a multi-chain direction, the next major step for Pyth was sending Pyth prices to every blockchain. We recognized that developers will need access to reliable, real-time data, no matter where they choose to build or expand to. Furthermore, Web3 in the longer-term will have to abstract away the complexities of what blockchain a dApp is operating from or transacting with: it is difficult to imagine decentralized finance becoming widely adopted otherwise.

Of course, an oracle that scales to the needs of a multi-chain future must also maintain the security and resiliency expectations of both decentralized and even traditional finance. The systemic shocks throughout crypto last year confirmed the need for even greater protocol security and unfailingly robust infrastructure.

From this vision, we forged Pythnet, and thus launched Pyth V2 on August 2022—an innovative oracle solution designed to scale with the growth of Web3 and equip builders on every chain with the mission-critical tooling necessary for the highest protocol performance.

Pyth V2: A New Low-Latency Pull Oracle

Pythnet is an application-specific blockchain (appchain) built on the Solana codebase. This blockchain uses the same software, but is completely separate from the Solana mainnet environment.

Much like in the Solana Price Feeds design, Pyth’s data providers submit their first-party prices to the Pyth program on Pythnet for aggregation. On top of this, Pythnet provides enables some powerful advantages:

1. Pythnet allows the Pyth Network to scale by 20x to support thousands of price feeds and perform tens of thousands of price updates per second.

2. Pythnet’s performance is independent of Solana mainnet, adding an additional redundancy layer to Pyth’s resiliency design.

3. Pythnet is publicly auditable using widely available tools like Dune Dashboard, TradingView, and the Solana Block Explorer: a stark contrast to legacy opaque P2P models.

4. Pythnet allows the network deliver prices to other blockchains through Wormhole, the cross-chain messaging protocol.

With Pythnet and Wormhole in place, the network could launch Pythnet Price Feeds, which introduced a unique low-latency pull oracle design.

Most other oracles (including Pyth’s Solana Price Feeds) utilize a push model and continually “push” on-chain price updates at a set frequency. In contrast, Pyth allows users to “pull” prices from Pythnet to their native chain on demand.

This new pull model enables Pyth Network to deliver higher-frequency updates price updates—once per second, faster than the block time of most blockchains. Users also benefit lower latencies: they can use the most recent off-chain (Pythnet) price, instead of relying on the last on-chain update pushed by the oracle.

The speed, scalability, and latency advantages described above are made possible thanks to the gas costs savings of Pyth’s on-demand oracle design. Compare the Pyth pull-based design to push oracles, which must pay gas fees for every price update, including updates that no one will use, and incur additional transaction costs for supporting new price feeds or additional blockchains.

Pythnet Price Feeds were designed for scaling. And scale it did. Pyth’s low-latency pull oracles now serve applications across 10+ EVM blockchains, Aptos, Cosmos Hub, and more. Let’s take a look at Pyth’s growth since V2’s launch.

Looking at the Numbers

The DeFi Ecosystem is Calling on Pyth

To date, the new Pyth on-demand price update model has already delivered over 800K price updates on-chain to #PoweredByPyth applications across over a dozen blockchains. On March 12 alone, Pyth received more than 25K price pull requests.

With this explosive growth in on-chain activity, Pyth V2 has proven to be a resounding success in the broader ecosystem.

New Blockchains: Pyth Data Everywhere

We’ve come far since April 2021, when Pyth started in Solana. The network made big moves upon deploying Pythnet to scale Pyth data to the wider DeFi ecosystem. Pyth first went live on BNB Chain in the beginning of October 2022, and in half a year, expanded to Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync Era, Polygon zkEVM, Base, Aptos, and Injective (Cosmos Hub), just to name a few.

The list of supported chains is bigger than most readers might realize! As of April, Pyth is available on 18 blockchains.

In line with April’s festivities, we’re giving away some website easter eggs: you can find the full list of Pyth-supported blockchain environments here. (Can you find the other surprises in our website?)

New Users: Everyone Wants Pyth Data

Expanding to new blockchains is one thing, but usage by smart contract is the real test of ‘product-market fit’. Don’t take our word for it: you can ask the contributors behind Synthetix how Pyth data has made their perps more competitive, and allowed their platform to reduce fees to 5-10 bps and support 23 new markets. The Synthetix ecosystem is now following suit, with Polynomial, Kwenta and Decentrex also becoming #PoweredByPyth. Optimism is in the air!

The astute Pythian will also have noticed that new blockchain expansion announcements means new Pythian launch partners. Be sure to say hello to 0VIX, the premier liquidity market protocol on Polygon’s zkEVM. We’re also excited to work with Nexon, an innovative lending provider, and Derivio, a structured derivatives ecosystem, on zkSync Era!

We also want to give a shoutout to the Injective ninjas. We’re excited to support the fastest blockchain built for finance. Helix, an exciting DEX on Injective, is launching a variety of markets across forex, crypto, and metals thanks to Pyth.

New builders in familiar ecosystems are coming out of the woodwork and making good use of Pyth Price Feeds. Some of them are lowkey OG’s, like CAP Finance, whose V4 perps are taking Arbitrum by storm, while upstarts like Poison Finance, the synthetics protocol, have emerged to democratize asset management. Traders rejoice, as Perpy Finance and Tigris are also here to help you copy trade and obtain up to 500x leverage.

Meanwhile on BNB Chain, Uniwhale and Level Finance are leveraging Pyth for their perpetuals futures. DEXs like DeriTrade and Meuna are also excited to bring RWA exposure to the masses thanks to Pyth’s wide asset class coverage. Nevertheless, not all use cases in BNB Land are high leverage and high intensity: the stableswap Wombat Exchange, for example, uses Pyth for their analytics.

In the MOVE world, you can find the borrow-lending platforms Aries Markets and Aptin, as well as hyper-app Thala Labs serving the Aptos ecosystem. You may have even heard rumors of Pyth moving into Sui…

Back in our homestead, Solana, you’ll find that the builder’s ethos has not wavered: Elusiv, a zero-knowledge privacy protocol, is making clever use of our Solana Price Feed; you can also lever up with PsyLend and mrgnlend as things heat up in Rust-land.

The list is never-ending and a comprehensive guide would be encyclopaedic. We recommend you also check out Morphex, the spot and futures DEX on Fantom; Fulcrom, the perps exchange on Cronos; Aurigami, the lending platform on Aurora, and many, many more.

Last, but not least, we’re elated to see Pyth data now integrated into TradingView, the leading chart platform trusted by 50M+ traders and investors globally.

Delivering The Prices You Need

Pyth now supports more than 230 price feeds across major asset classes, with many more still in the pipeline!

Not only that, but every Pyth price feed is automatically available on all supported blockchains. Unlike legacy oracles, Pyth does not need to spin up a new feed one-by-one on every blockchain it wants to expand to.

Having readily available data feeds on every chain makes all the difference for builders. Pyth helps developers deploy faster, seize multi-chain growth opportunities, and strategically extend exposure to their own protocol to new blockchain ecosystems.

We can’t wait to reveal the newest asset types the network will soon support! Suffice to say, we’ve received substantial interest from teams looking to work with treasury rates, energy prices, and even international equities.

Later in March, Pyth demonstrated its unwavering dedication to agility and rapidity in delivering price feeds to those in need, and the world took notice. Thanks to the amazing effort of our data providers, the Pyth Network launched its ARB/USD feed mere hours after the $ARB started trading on-chain!

Our ability to spin up new price feeds rapidly means that teams like CAP Finance (Arbitrum), Uniwhale (BNB Chain), Drift (Solana), Zeta Markets, Vyper, Tigris Trade (Arbitrum), and of course, Synthetix (Optimism) could quickly launch their $ARB perpetual futures to meet the surge in demand from traders—many of them on that same day!

Pyth Driving Serious Volume

Pyth is now close to supporting $40B in total trading volume throughout its lifetime.

Let’s reflect on some recent trends in trading volume. The $ARB drop, combined with volatility from the recent events of SVB and Signature Bank, brought new all-time-highs in volume across our #PoweredByPyth perpetual partners. Synthetix themselves began seeing daily volumes of up to $200M and $1.5B in total trading volume, resulting in a whopping $1.5M in fees!

The other stars of the show include Perpy Finance (Arbitrum), CAP Finance, Uniwhale Drift, HXRO (Solana), Cypher, and Fulcrom (Cronos)—each one achieving their own ATH’s across their Pyth-powered perpetual markets!

New Products

Benchmarks

Historical Pyth data is finally here. Users can leverage our new Pyth Benchmarks to access historical Pyth market data, and soon, other types of standardized data.

Pyth Benchmarks cover all 200+ assets supported by the network. Industry leaders like Ribbon Finance, the premier DOV on Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche, is leveraging Pyth Benchmarks to settle its weekly options every Friday at 8:00 AM UTC. Benchmarks allows Ribbon to retrieve exact settlement prices within seconds of expiry and settle instantly.

Benchmarks represent a major step for decentralized finance. In the traditional financial world, there exists a number of universally accepted standards (or “benchmarks”), including reference prices (e.g. Bitcoin reference rate), indices (e.g. the S&P500), and reference rates (e.g. LIBOR). Few such standards exist within the realms of crypto or DeFi. We hope that our Benchmarks will, at the very least, drive conversation around blockchain transparency and empower market participants with more thoughtful choices in the data sources which shape their decision-making. You can read more here.

Liquidity Oracle

We’re also excited to have launched the V1 of the Pyth Liquidity Oracle in collaboration with Kaiko, one of our data provider partners and a leader in cryptocurrency market data.

Bringing liquidity information on-chain, on top of price data, can help protect lending platforms and money market protocols from liquidity exploits as seen with Aave or Mango Markets. We designed the Pyth Liquidity Oracle V1 to help users mitigate the risks inherent in large positions of illiquid tokens. You can read more about our initial research on liquidity oracles and get started with our V1 solution here.

Get Started with Pyth

Unlock the full potential of your application with Pyth data, and gain the edge you deserve. Integrating with Pyth data feeds is seamless and easy.

You can explore our documentation to learn more about how Pyth’s unique design can secure your protocol with real-time, on-demand price data:

• How Pyth Network Works
• On-Demand Updates

You can explore our catalog of price feeds here:

• Pythnet Price Feeds (for Aptos, BAS, Coswasm, EVM)
• Solana Price Feeds

Follow along with our integration tutorials:

• Integrate on EVM (On-Demand)
• Integrate on EVM (with Pusher)
• Integrate on Other Chains or Off-Chain

What’s Coming Next

Our mission remains the same. Pyth will continue expanding cross-chain through Wormhole to support builders across the wider decentralized finance and Web3 ecosystem. Supporting developers with the requisite training, tooling, and guidance is top of mind for the network’s contributors, and we’re eager to announce more on this front.

We also look forward to sharing a number of exciting developments focused on making the Pyth network fully self-sustaining and decentralized. If you have any feedback or ideas, please feel free to reach out in our Discord. Those especially interested in protocol governance and network security can keep track of the continuous and rigorous auditing of our cross-chain and governance contracts.

We’ve come a long way together on our journey towards fairer and more transparent markets, governed by users and serving individuals and institutions alike. And yet, we’re still so early.

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.