It’s summertime and halfway into 2023. The tribulations of 2022 have made way for a subtle, but definite buzz throughout DeFi as heads-down builders have started revealing the fruits of their labor.
If there’s an imagery that captures the Pythian spirit over the last six months, it would be that of stonecutting. Let’s take a snippet from one of the Pyth contributor’s summer reading list: in New York Times Bestseller Atomic Habits, James Clear shares one of his favorite motivational quotes:
“I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know that it was not the last blow that did it—but all that had gone before."
The Pyth Network is gearing up for its own explosive moment—a transformative shift to a new DeFi paradigm, where the first billion DeFi users are onboarded, the traditional lines between TradFi and DeFi are blurred, and a revolution in financial data unlocks once-exclusive assets for the global community. #ItWillHappen
Pyth Network, Today
Imagine you were inspired by a similar mission as one driving the Pyth Network’s development, and you too founded your own financial data oracle. Who would be your dream users—the biggest applications whose patronage would represent the greatest seal of approval?
For the Pyth Network, this answer includes titans like Aave, Synthetix, and Venus, among others; and for the Pyth community, dreams are becoming reality.
Aave
Pyth data powering Aave? It’s more likely than you think! Early June, the Pyth Data Association proposed to the AAVE community to deploy Pyth as a backup oracle for Aave on Optimism. A successful temperature check confirmed the prevailing viewpoint that adopting Pyth as a secondary oracle will yield benefits in resiliency, efficiency, and decentralization. While development work and final governance steps are pending, we’re honored to receive these first blessings from the AAVE and wider DeFi communities.
Synthetix
The Synthetix Council made the landmark decision last December to transition to off-chain price oracles with on-chain validity verification for their Perps V2, thereby adopting Pyth Network as their primary oracle and facilitating more than $15B in trading since its launch.
Their community-written performance report said it best: “Without the need to thwart front runners through cost-prohibitive pricing, fees have fallen dramatically to the point that Synthetix perps are among the most competitively priced in the DeFi space.” The Synthetix ecosystem took notice quickly, and now Lyra, Kwenta, Polynomial, Conduit, and Decentrex are also #PoweredByPyth.
Venus
The vote for VIP-123 (Resilient Price Feeds) went live on the end of May. The voters have decided: as part of the new logic to eliminate single points of failure, the Venus V4 Upgrade will include Pyth Network data among the support of multiple other on-chain prices sources. The Venus contributors are hard at work in releasing what one could describe as their ‘biggest upgrades ever’. It’s an honor to have Pyth data be a part of this symbolic upgrade.
Serving All of DeFi: Launching stETH/USD
The Pyth Network was founded to serve all of DeFi. The instantaneous scalability of the network’s pull oracle design means that any Pyth price feed becomes immediately available across all 20+ supported chains.
Lido has joined forces with the Pyth Network to launch the long-desired stETH/USD price feed, effectively boosting the liquidity and capital efficiency of the Web3 capital markets.
As many readers know, Staked Ether (stETH) is a liquid token representing an Ethereum token that is “staked”. While users can keep their original Ethereum staked to secure the network and earn rewards, they can utilize Lido’s stETH to continue engaging in DeFi activities. The importance of stETH in unlocking liquidity for staking-secured economies cannot be overstated. No wonder Lido is the single largest DeFi application by total value locked (TVL).
Before the arrival of Pyth Network’s stETH/USD feed, builders were mostly relegated to three blockchain ecosystems with the relevant oracle offerings. No longer. The Pyth stETH/USD feed was swept up by titans like Synthetix, Venus (V2), and Ribbon Finance, as well as emerging pioneers, including 0VIX and D8X Exchange on Polygon zkEVM.
Peering into the Network
Transparency is a key tenet of decentralization. The launch of Pyth Stats (V1) brings another powerful tool for the community to visualize, evaluate, and discuss the Pyth Network’s daily activity and overall growth. This is an excellent visualization tool in addition to the Dune Dashboard and the Publisher Metrics, which allow users to monitor Pyth’s oracle usage and the network’s data providers’ performance respectively.
A Decentralized Price Scheduler by Kwenta and Gelato
The most observant of the Pyth community may have realized that Kwenta and Gelato are working on a decentralized price scheduler for Pyth Price Feeds. DApps will soon be able to fund a decentralized set of keepers or automation bots that programmatically pull Pyth prices on-chain at a pre-defined frequency. This tooling opens a new world of possibilities, as developer teams and individuals can start building dynamic applications that respond to real-time market conditions.
More announcements on this development and additional significant launches will follow soon.
Numbers Go Up
The One Oracle To Call On
Applications from any Pyth-supported blockchain can request or “pull” a signed price update onto their native chain to enable user transactions. Every time an application “pulls” a Pyth price update, another price update is added to the stats.
By April 2023, Pyth exceeded 1M on-chain price updates. By the end of June, the Pyth Network pull oracle model has delivered over 4.5M on-demand price updates to #PoweredByPyth protocols.
To be clear, the on-demand price update statistics currently do not include Solana transactions. Those numbers are literally off the charts. Our more astute readers can always consult our Dune Dashboard of course and see the strengths of Solana themselves.
The number of requested price updates is a critical metric for understanding user demand for Pyth data and demonstrating how important Pyth Price Feeds are for the wider DeFi community. Another way to conceptualize the magnitude of demand for Pyth data is to consider the cost dimension of “pulling” Pyth price updates: the Pyth protocol design accepts data fees to update on-chain price feeds.
Governance in the future will determine the continuation and size of the fee. As of now, the current fee structure comprises a successful proof-of-concept of protocol fee collection for compensating data providers and other governance-determined uses.
Turn Up the Volume
The last time we reflected on the Pyth Network’s progress in Q1, the network had facilitated $37B in total trading volume. Just three months later, Pyth now boasts well over $50B in cumulative traded volume supported! June brought in a hot summer, overseeing $5.9B in monthly supported volume.
The story behind Pyth’s volume numbers is just the honest day’s work meme instantiated. As Pyth Network covers more blockchains and supports more protocols, volume growth is expected to continue along a super-linear trend. More volume indicates greater demand for financial and trading services and, thus, demand for Pyth data. Current and prospective data providers are well aware of this trend, and more are stepping up to the plate to supply data across everyone’s favorite assets.
New Blockchains: The Universe Expands
Our humble origins in Solana are dwarfed by our expanse across 23 exciting L1 and L2 blockchains. In the month of June alone, Pyth oracles launched on Fantom, Osmosis, Gnosis, and Mantle—an excellent showcase of the sheer scalability of the Pyth pull oracle model. Pyth has also launched on Sui and Sei (testnet), in order to meet DeFi teams wherever they might choose to build, as entrepreneurs now enjoy an abundance of promising chains to found or expand their projects on.
One might sense a positive feedback loop emerging, as the permissionnless and accessible nature of Pyth Price Feeds, thanks to the scalability of Pythnet and Wormhole, have caught the attention of established and upstart blockchains. The launch of Pyth oracles fuels the DeFi leaders of those chains, and more of the DeFi ecosystem takes notice.
New Users: A Brief Tour of a Rainforest of Vibrant Protocols
Let’s drill down more into the numbers. We finished the previous quarter with almost 120 confirmed users of Pyth data. Dozens more have joined the #PoweredByPyth family, and the network served 170 on-chain and off-chain protocols by the end of June.
The number of app integrations is always a conservative count, as Pyth Price Feeds are permissionless. Any protocol can begin requesting and using Pyth price updates: no paperwork, no whitelisting of addresses needed—just pure DeFi. We recommend that teams using Pyth data to reach out, so that the Pyth contributors can help explore further synergies and ways to excite the world on what you’re building.
Let’s close off this blog with one last sprint. Who’s #PoweredByPyth and on what blockchain?
In the Optimism universe, more of the Synthetix ecosystem has embraced the virtues of Pyth prices. We’re delighted to welcome Lyra, the options AMM, and Conduit Finance, the decentralized derivatives trading platform, to the network. There’s electricity in the air, as Pika Protocol (V4), the leverage trading platform, and Avantis Finance, a derivatives platform, make their moves too.
Arbitrum is making itself known as one of the prime trading chains. You'll recognize popular names like CAP Finance among the #PoweredByPyth Arbitrum players. Last month, we also celebrated the official launches of Vela Exchange and HMX, the newest exchanges on everyone's timelines. The network also welcomed new wave of innovative solutions: Beluga an oracle-based AMM, made a splash alongside exotic options DEX Buffer Finance, and Vyper, the DeFi derivatives layer originating from Solana. RWA’s are still top-of-mind for visionary builders and financial participants looking to diversify: many will know of Duet Protocol and Poison Finance, the synthetic assets platforms.
Speaking of buzzy trends, new solutions are emerging in the zkSync Era landscape. Say hello to zkDX and SynFutures, the newest decentralized exchanges for derivatives and perps. Pyth is also the oracle of choice for the top four borrow/lending platforms on zkSync Era: ReactorFusion, xBank, Basilisk, and Era Lend. As for Polygon zkEVM, we proudly support 0VIX Protocol, their number one lending protocol, and D8X, an upcoming perpetual futures DEX.
As the network supports an increasing cast of multi-chain players, we would like to shine a spotlight on some inspiring stories: Deri Protocol, a perpetual products platform is expanding their Protocol as a Service (PaaS) to BNB Chain, Arbitrum, and zkSync. DeriTrade, the 100% community-driven trading platform, is making similar moves, along with Narwhal, the decentralized perpetuals platform. Shoutout to our fellow serpents at Vyper offering OTC derivatives on Solana and Arbitrum.
In BNB Chain, Pyth has made a name for itself as the number one oracle for perpetuals, facilitating the massive volumes brought in by names like Level Finance, Alpaca Finance, and Uniwhale. Outside of the perps realm, we have pioneers like Sable Finance introducing a new “sablecoin”, a reformative primitive for ETH LSD-backed sables, KiloEx, a next generation perpetuals platform, leading the charge in furthering DeFi’s capabilities.
In the Aptos world, the Pyth community was elated to welcome the launch of Thala Labs, the leading borrow/lending platform in Aptos, Tsunami Finance, the margin trading and spot exchange, and Merkle Trade, the leveraged trading platform.
Speaking of launches, the Sui squad came in full force: we have lending teams, like Aries Markets, Navi Protocol, and Interest Protocol. Perpetual platforms include Kriya and Turbos. Money markets and DeFi suites feature Aftermath, Fewcha, and Typus. Bucket Protocol is bringing a stablecoin and loan solution.
Pyth also went live on Osmosis, and currently powers Levana, the fully-collateralized perps platform, and Mars, the galaxy’s most powerful credit protocol. Where will Pyth expand to next among the cosmos?
Pyth has also set sail on Sei testnet. Introducing: Kryptonite, the borrow-lending protocol, Levana, the fully-collateralized perp trading platform, and SeaSwap, the DeFi layered platform. We look forward to seeing everyone on mainnet!
As for our Rustaceans on Solana, we see a community combining the power of Pyth with IoT at Helium, a global network of hotspots, and even AI, with marginfi’s Omni, designed to answer your questions live about Web3.
It’s a whole new world with whole new blockchains. On Conflux, we’re supporting Mold, a derivatives platform for RWA’s. Things are getting deep with Deepr Finance, an upcoming money markets protocol on ShimmerEVM testnet. Tsunami Exchange, the aptly named perps DEX, has emerged on Waves Blockchain.
If there’s any takeaway from the last quarter, it’s that activity has not ceased. Innovation does not stop—and the Pyth Network is here for it.
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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