The Web3 industry has spoken. Demand for high throughput DeFi is at an all-time high, and it’s powered by the Pyth Network.
Oracles are a necessary ingredient for faster and more reliable DeFi. From 2021 to 2023, oracles have secured 59% of global total value locked (TVL). Given the importance of reliable oracle infrastructure, the Web3 developer community has chosen Pyth as their go-to oracle.
Don't just take our word for it: Pyth Network is now the second largest oracle on DefiLlama and secures 48% of all oracle-powered DEX trading volume globally.
The Pythian community has expressed their excitement and anticipation for the network’s transition to a permissionless mainnet and governance. Leading the charge is Douro Labs, which will support the Pyth Network’s engineering and business development efforts as a new core contributor.
With the introduction of Whitepaper Version 2.0, the Pyth Network embarks on a new chapter. This also signifies one of the final transformations of DeFi, moving from its ‘wild west’ days to a more mature state. The community is now faced with crucial discussions as the network prepares for on-chain governance. Governance can affect various important network mechanisms, including aggregation, data fee properties, and the distribution of publisher rewards.
The Pyth Network is almost unrecognizable from when it started this year. We’ve come a long way in this shared journey. We’re ready to embrace the opportunities that lie ahead for the final quarter of 2023 and beyond—together as a community. #ItWillHappen
Pyth Network, Today
Perseus Upgrade
One of Pyth’s unique advantages is the universal accessibility of its price feeds offering. In the spirit of empowering developers with seamless access to price data, the Pyth Network has launched the Perseus Upgrade.
The upgrade reduces gas costs for Pyth users by 50-80 % while increasing speed and enhancing reliability. The mythology fans among our readers will recognize the reference to the hero, Perseus, who prevailed over difficult obstacles thanks to his courage and resourcefulness.
This upgrade introduces major changes to the network architecture to deliver these cost, latency, and reliability improvements. The core change is eliminating batching and instead allowing the users to group any set of price feeds into a payload: the protocol puts all current prices into a Merkle tree and uses Wormhole to sign the root of the tree. You can learn more in our blog post.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Let’s talk numbers. As of the time of writing, the Pyth Network welcomes three new dApp integrations every week on average. In August alone, 15 new protocols joined the #PoweredByPyth movement. Another 12 joined the network and started work on their integrations in September. The Pyth ecosystem is becoming synonymous with cutting-edge DeFi.
Volumes also tell a story of transformative growth. When Synthetix on Optimism finished their integration last December, it stood at $5B in cumulative trading volume. Pyth Price Feeds made their platform more competitive. In just 9 months, Synthetix and Kwenta have taken the throne at 1st and 2nd place on the DefiLlama derivatives leaderboard.
A New Core Contributor: Douro Labs
On August 29, Douro Labs pulled back the curtain to announce its role as the newest core contributor to the Pyth Network. Douro Labs will focus on building the oracle tooling and Web3 infrastructure necessary for expanding the oracle network’s suite of decentralized data services.
Douro Labs brings passionate individuals with backgrounds from Goldman Sachs, Jump Crypto, BNP Paribas, Amazon Web Services, and Chorus One. The company was formed in July by long-time Pyth Network contributors Mike Cahill, Jayant Krishnamurthy, and Ciaran Cronin. You can follow Douro Labs on Twitter and LinkedIn.
zk-Rollups Just Got Sweeter
You can now launch your own zk-Rollup service in one click. Gelato’s zk-Rollup as a Service (zkRaaS) platform enables developers to create an environment of near-instant transaction finality, cheap fees, high TPS, and zk-powered validity proofs for trustless computation. All 350+ Pyth Price Feeds are now available for developers launching their own zk-Rollup.
This integration follows Gelato’s launch of Web3 functions with Kwenta, which enables dApps to set up decentralized automation networks and update Pyth prices on-chain to inform conditional orders for DeFi derivatives.
Speed Matters
Speed matters in trading. This rule applies not just to traders, but also smart contract developers delivering DeFi services. When new digital assets are listed, DeFi builders want to quickly engage the surge in popularity for that asset. How quickly an oracle provider can serve these markets makes a world of difference for market participants.
The Pyth contributors have taken this duty to heart. When Base mainnet launched, Pyth Price Feeds were immediately available to support players like CAP Finance, Perennial Labs, Buffer Finance, Deperp, and Pike Finance who were ready to launch. The contributors followed the same playbook with Mantle. Pyth Price Feeds were ready to support FusionX and Pinnako right from the start.
Price Feeds, Your Way
The Pyth Network launched 180 new price feeds over the past three quarters. The mission since day one has been to bring all financial market data on-chain.
In this early phase of the Pyth ecosystem, market demand is the main deciding factor for which price feeds are launched. Ask and you shall receive. The perps market has spoken, and the Pyth contributors responded with the launch of the ETH/BTC pair to serve players like Synthetix and their ecosystem—Kwenta, Lyra Finance, Decentrex, and more.
The launch of jitoSOL/USD was a poetic way to conclude this year’s Solana Summer. The liquid-staking SOL pair quickly powered new markets for Drift, Mango Markets, Vyper, Kamino, Lifinity, Tulip, Jet, GooseFX, and many more.
Pyth Data on TradingView
The launch of Pyth’s TradingView functionality proved to be a powerful asset for DeFi developers who need intuitive and trusted price charting. You don’t have to be a DEX operator to wield this power. Even crafty individuals can hook up TradingView charts on their own riced UI’s to access Pyth Price Feeds. Get started today.
The Community Odyssey
The Pythian community proved their mettle with the week-long Odyssey on Zealy. More than 280 Pythians climbed the leaderboard to secure their ItWillHappen roles, a testament to their capabilities as passionate acolytes of the Pythia. Sentimental POAPs were also sent to the best thread writers and artists among the contestants.
Although the Odyssey is over now, the Pythian party continues on. You can look forward to more games and contests in the official Discord server.
Be sure to keep an eye out for more content from Mike and Jayant. You can catch Mike’s keynote on the Pyth Effect from TOKEN2049 in Singapore, his conversation on Unchained with Laura Shin, and a deep discussion with Frank Chaparro on The Block. Jayant has made appearances on the Validated podcast and Founder’s Funnel.
Highlights: Who’s Using Pyth Data?
We would like to showcase some interesting use cases of Pyth data by our DeFi community.
Let’s start with the Greeks. Thales is building parimutuel markets, including the recently released Speed Markets, on Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Base. Speed Markets uses Pyth Benchmarks.
Perennial is a permissionless derivatives primitive on Arbitrum. Perennial has overseen over $1B in volume and $5M in TVL. Perennial’s V2 is #PoweredByPyth.
HMX is a decentralized perpetual exchange with cross-margin and multi-asset collateral support on Arbitrum. We’re proud to enable HMX to outperform and break $2B in trading volume and almost $1M in protocol fees.
Speaking of volumes, Helix, the premier spot and derivatives DEX on Injective, surpassed $12B in total volume and $16M in TVL as of September with over 2.5M Pyth price updates requested.
C3 is a self-custodial exchange that combines the advantages of both CEXs and DEXs, including self-custody, chain agnosticism, and fast performance. C3 has achieved over 5M Pyth updates on their invite-only testnet.
Fixed-rate products are now on-chain thanks to Jet Protocol and Pyth Price Feeds. Sophisticated lending markets allow for advanced trading strategies and greater adoption by institutional players.
Stats to the Moon
Our Key Performance Indicator (KPI) metrics reveal a narrative of a strategic shift, the timely introduction of a cross-chain architecture, and a growing landscape of opportunities in the multi-chain space.
A quick refresher for new readers: Pyth Network introduces an innovative low-latency pull oracle. Applications using Pyth can request or “pull” price updates when they need it. This architecture is different from traditional oracles which continuously “push” price updates on-chain. This “push” oracle model requires users to wait for the next pushed update and can waste gas on updates that no one uses.
The advantages of Pyth’s gas efficiency include lower-latency price feeds and higher-frequency updates. The Pyth oracle solution can also scale to thousands of price feeds and support any blockchain that developers choose to build on.
Let’s examine the Pyth Network’s most recent growth trends.
Call Me Maybe
Daily Average Updates (DAUs) represent every time a smart contract calls a price update from the Pyth protocol. Every time a user “pulls” an update, they pay a small data fee. Average updates are therefore an insightful way to measure demand for Pyth data.
DAUs shot up to 1.2M in July and experienced another growth spurt to 1.9M in August. DAUs cooled off in September, as fluctuations in average updates are dependent on trading activity and general market cycles.
Zooming out to cumulative price updates across the year, readers will note an exponential growth pattern. Cross-chain price updates started from virtually no activity and crossed 50M in July. By the end of August, that count exceeded 100M updates.
These updates are made possible through the daily contributions of Pyth's data providers, who send 300M price updates to Pythnet every day, resulting in 50M aggregate prices, of which over 1.5M are delivered cross-chain daily.
Sheer Volume
Cumulative traded volume secured tells another story of adoption. Over the past three quarters, the total trading volume supported by Pyth has more than doubled.
We can break down the cumulative volume measures by blockchains to identify where the most trading activity comes from.
This metric, coincidentally, makes the Pyth Network an interesting barometer for DeFi activity and understanding which ecosystems are more active. We can see, for example, that Optimism is a major player in terms of volume, with Arbitrum as the second close contender. Perpetual trading is the primary driver behind these volume numbers.
Total Value Secured: The Rise After the Fall
Total Value Secured (TVS), or oracle-related Total Value Locked, tells another compelling tale of recovery and overwhelming multi-chain traction.
Readers will recall that Pyth Network started out as a Solana-focused oracle. In 2022, the Web3 world felt the systemic crises of FTX’s collapse and the following exodus of locked capital from the Solana ecosystem.
In that same year, Pyth started going cross-chain. The contributors launched Pythnet application-chain and began sending price updates to BNB Chain, then Aptos, and then dozens more chains across the EVM, Move, and Cosmos ecosystems.
As Pyth began supporting more chains, new applications began integrating with Pyth’s low-latency price feeds. Throughout 2023, Pyth experienced a resurgence in TVS, surpassing $1.0B by June.
Breaking down the cumulative TVS statistic by chain also reveals interesting observations about where Pyth Price Feeds are the dominant, go-to solution. In fact, Pyth comprises 90% of the TVS on eight blockchains and over 50% for eleven of them.
Some high-activity chains worth highlighting include zkSync Era, where Pyth has secured over 90% of the ecosystem’s TVS since March. Pyth also secures over 90% of the TVS for Sui, 66% for BNB Chain, and 40% for Optimism.
New Blockchains: An Ever-Expanding Ecosystem
Developers deserve reliable, secure access to high-fidelity price data for their smart contracts, no matter where they choose to build. There is still one more quarter to go, leaving one to wonder how many chains Pyth will encompass by year-end.
New supported blockchains include:
- EOS EVM, an emulation of Ethereum network’s EVM
- EON, Horizen’s fully EVM-compatible smart contracting platform
- Stacks, the Bitcoin layer for smart contracts and DeFi
- Scroll, a native zkEVM Layer 2 for Ethereum
- Sei, a Layer-1 blockchain designed for DeFi and built on the Cosmos SDK
- Evmos, an application-agnostic chain that is interoperable with Ethereum Mainnet
- Linea, a developer-ready zk-Rollup for scaling Ethereum dApps
- Neutron, a cross-chain CosmWasm platform
New Price Feeds: Every Feed On Every Chain
Another advantage of Pyth Price Feeds is that the full suite of data feeds are available to developers, no matter what Pyth-supported blockchain they choose. For example, a team on Arbitrum can expand to Base and have access to the same price feeds. This means the developers can serve the same products on both chains.
In general, more price feeds enable developers to provide a broader range of DeFi solutions. Pyth has nearly doubled its price feed offerings since the beginning of this year. In the month of August, the network released a new price feed every day.
New Users: Welcome One and All
Chances are, your favorite DeFi applications are #PoweredByPyth. The Pyth ecosystem now encompasses more than 220 on-chain and off-chain applications.
Remember that the total DeFi user metric is a conservative count. Pyth Price Feeds are permissionless, meaning anyone can start using Pyth data by simply reading the documentation and plugging it in. They do not need to reach out to a sales team, sign paperwork, or ask for anyone’s permission. This is what it means to DeFi.
Let's delve into some notable integrations from Q3 2023:
Multi-Chain
- Avantis Finance, ecosystem for derivatives and yield products on Optimism and Base
- Pike Finance, an upcoming universal liquidity protocol across EVM and SVM chains
- Sable, the issuer of the USDS stablecoin on BNB Chain and Base, has launched its beta with Pyth data.
- Fringe Finance, multi-chain borrow-lending will start using Pyth on zkSync Era.
- LogX, perps aggregator on Arbitrum and Mantle
Linea
- LayerBankFi, money-market protocol on Linea
- Mendi Finance, P2P decentralized liquidity protocol on Linea
- Mooncake Finance, decentralized lending on Linea and Base
Base
Arbitrum
- Foxify, a decentralized trading platform for P2P options and perps on Arbitrum
- CAP Finance, the ‘OG’ perps platform, expands from Arbitrum to Base.
Mantle
- Magma, an innovative AMM, on Mantle
- Lendle, liquidity market on Mantle
- REAX is the first trustless synthetic asset issuance and trading protocol on Mantle
zkSync Era
- ZeroLend, decentralized lending on zkSync Era
- zkEra, perps exchange on zkSync Era
- Galleon, fully on-chain AMM-based perps and derivatives exchange on zkSync Era
- Gambit Trade, a next-gen perps exchange on zkSync Era
- Gambit Trade: A next-gen perps exchange on zkSync Era, benefiting from Pyth's real-time pricing.
Sei
- Aeroscraper, a governance-free, interest-free decentralized borrow-lending platform on Sei
Evmos
- Tashi, the #1 lending protocol on Evmos
Move Ecosystem
- ABEx, on-chain derivatives on Sui
- Merkle Trade, decentralized leverage trading on Aptos
Solana
- Lulo Finance, p2p lending and borrowing platform on Solana.
- Jet launched its Fixed Rate product on Solana thanks to Pyth.
Celo
- ImmortalX, the first decentralized perpetual exchange on Celo
Thank you for reading. Developer activity in the bear has only picked up throughout the year. With one more quarter left, we can’t wait to see what the Pyth ecosystem delivers next. Whatever you choose to build, we are here to support you.
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.
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