#10 Hackathon & Whitepaper Release: 2022 off to good start
Welcome to the 10th issue of the Pyth newsletter: HiFi for DeFi. This edition will cover the Convergence Hackathon, the Solana Bootcamp and Pyth Workshop, as well as the Pyth white paper release!
About:
The Pyth network is a vision coming to life: one that imagines the world of decentralized finance (DeFi) gaining comprehensive access to high-fidelity (HiFi) financial markets data securely and reliably.
In other words, the Pyth network is a specialized oracle network that focuses on sourcing continuous real-world and crypto-related market data originating off-chain and streaming it on-chain at sub-second speeds for smart contract consumption regardless of their blockchains.
This is an ambitious goal because financial market data is sufficiently unique: there are very few available sources, and those sources have very tightly controlled distributions. In addition, the oracle network needs to be able to combine such latency-sensitive data in way that optimizes not only accuracy but which increases security as well given how dependent many blockchain applications are on the accuracy of this type of data.
Website, Medium, Twitter & Discord
Convergence Hackathon with Wormhole and Project Serum
As mentioned in the previous substack, Pyth is partaking in the Convergence Hackathon led by the Wormhole and Serum teams. This one-month-long Hackathon garners over $500K in prizes for submissions. Prizes exist for integrating with Pyth, Wormhole, Serum, PsyOptions, Terra, and Atrix.
To bolster knowledge and ideas for builders, this Hackathon has been organizing daily presentations from various leading protocols on Solana. You can find all the replays on the Project Serum Youtube channel.
Among all the talks, we would recommend the following:
The Pyth: Under the Hood is led by Jayant Krishnamurthy, one of the core contributors to the Pyth network. The 45 minutes presentation tackles 3 questions: What is Pyth, How to use Pyth, and finally a technical dive into the Pyth world (aggregation method, confidence interval...) with some attendance questions.
This presentation is fitting anyone that either wants to discover Pyth for the first time as well as long-term Pythians that wish to further polish their knowledge.
The Convergence Hackathon continues this week with another stacked program!
Chicago: Where the Building Happens
Chicago, Illinois in the US of A, has been, and will continue to be where the next leg of Solana building starts. In conjunction with Solana and Jump Crypto, the Pyth network has been involved with a Solana Bootcamp aimed to train, among others, Pyth network publishers and other stakeholders to build on Solana. This 1st week has welcomed (on-site and virtually) more than 150 participants and was wonderfully led by Jarry. Recordings will soon be available for the public to get started with the best content out there.
This week (17-21 January) consists of 2 simultaneous events: a Pyth Workshop and the Chicago Hacker House, both happening in same the building.
The Pyth Workshop will continue with over 150 participants and have a variety of topics discussed from a whitepaper walkthrough, Solana RPC/validator set up, to the introduction of some of the core features within Pyth like HUMAN protocol. Once again, the workshop will be recorded and made available at a later date for anyone to refer to.
Meanwhile, the Chicago Hacker House will welcome about 250 participants looking forward to meeting and building with some of the best minds (and people) of the Solana Ecosystem.
As a reminder, this Solana Hacker House is the 3rd of its kind after the Lisbon one, covered in our 5th Pythiad, and the Miami edition, covered in our 8th substack. What began as a getaway for developers to hunker down and build at Solana's biggest conference has become a worldwide movement. HackerHouse can best be described as a pop-up developer experience taking over major cities around the world. This Chicago Hacker House is sponsored by Jump Crypto, Wormhole, Holaplex, HXRO, Identity, Civic, Narwhal Ventures, CoinFX, Samoyedcoin, and of course Solana and the Pyth network.
Will we see you at the next Hacker House?
Pyth Whitepaper Release
On the 18th January 2022, the Financial Times helped break the news: the Pyth network has released its long-awaited whitepaper and formalized the announcement of the PYTH token.
This whitepaper aims to expand on the design of the protocol that powers the Pyth network, including from an incentive and governance perspective across publishers, consumers, and delegators. The goal of the design is to make the Pyth network self-sustaining and decentralized.
The community reaction was amazing and we are grateful to have the support of so many wonderful people, so thank you very much for everything.
As always, we will try to bring to you, twice a month, some extra perspective on the Pyth network design (as outlined in the whitepaper) and what to look for next.
For now, we have released a Pyth Whitepaper Summary Blog for those that would not have enough time to read on the full whitepaper (but be sure to, you don’t want to miss it!).
That is all for our 10th newsletter — Thank you for reading, and don’t forget to subscribe and share!
We can’t wait to hear what you think! Feel free to join the Pyth Discord server, follow Pyth on Twitter (here is our Chinese Twitter), join the Telegram (here is our Chinese Telegram), read our Medium blogs to learn more, and ask any questions you may have.