#16 On our Way to Earth
This edition will fill you with the latest Pyth news wherever it may happen: the Bahamas, Chicago, Solana, and even Terra? So sit back and enjoy!
About:
The Pyth network is a first-party financial oracle solution that aims to bring valuable market data to the general public. The network does so by incentivizing market participants — trading firms, market makers, and exchanges — to share directly on-chain the price data collected as part of their existing operations. The network then aggregates this first-party price data (still on-chain) and makes it available for use by either on- or off-chain applications. Discover more in our whitepaper.
Build with Pyth
Price Feeds Reliability
Oracles need to be highly reliable since inaccurate prices or service outages can cause financial losses for downstream users, especially as the DeFi ecosystem grows in size and complexity.
For example, a lending protocol that receives an inaccurate oracle price could incorrectly liquidate its users. As an oracle secures more value, the consequences of failure become more serious. Even small failure probabilities become unacceptable.
With this in mind, Pyth network’s contributing developers have been spending a significant amount of time (and will continue to do so) on building highly reliable data feeds. With great power, comes great responsibility.
For greater explanation and details about our thought process and actions, visit our latest blog: Reliability Efforts at Pyth. Also, please reach out to us with any questions, concerns, or suggestions on Twitter at @anihamde and @jayantkrish.
Pyth Infrastructure Providers
Our goal is to deliver the best HiFi financial data to the blockchain, and doing so requires the skills of the most cutting-edge actors out there. So not only are high-quality publishers needed, but we must support them with the best-in-class infrastructure to empower them and reach our common goals.
Why is infrastructure paramount to Pyth success?
Performance: Publishers in the Pyth network need dedicated infrastructure to maintain a high-frequency update (on par with Solana speed). Indeed, to generate about 10 million price updates daily (200k per asset), the Pyth network publishers initiate about 100 million Solana transactions every day.
Reliability & Decentralization: if Pyth publishers would all rely on a single node provider, any defect originating from it would negatively impact the whole network and the applications that depend on it. A single defective infrastructure provider would affect the publishers relying on its services in today's environment. However, all the others would still be able to operate and continue offering HiFi data to anyone. As of today, there are 55 publishers spread around seven infrastructure providers.
Read our blog for more details.
Solana Riptide Hackathon
After many weeks of building, submissions to the Solana Riptide Hackathon (with up to $5M in prizes) have closed. Over 400 projects were submitted, with 60 on the Pyth track!
We want to congratulate and thank all participants for their grit and support. We look forward to seeing how you’ll change the world!
The Pyth Track Grand Winner is Neptune, a lending and borrowing platform featuring elegant features such as variable & stable rate loans, collateral swapping, and self-repaying loans. We had the Neptune team on a Twitter Space earlier this week, so listen in to learn more.
Other eye-catching candidates:
Dual Finance aims to improve significantly existing DeFi DOVs by implementing streaming prices, rehypothecated collateral, and a novel staking offering.
Prophet is a gaming hub on Solana whose 1st game is already live on mainnet. Users can participate in the SOL/USD price prediction game, where each event lasts 5 minutes.
Incept Protocol is a synthetic asset protocol that offers an intuitive trading experience with supercharged liquidity. One Incept novelty allows liquidity providers to choose a single asset to back a concentrated position.
V-DEX is a synthetic protocol whose key components include a synthesizer, exchange, AMMs, governing system, liquidating system, inflation system, and oracle.
Bahamas Hacker House & SALT Conference
In partnership with Solana Foundation and Project Serum, Pyth co-led the Bahamas Solana Hacker House, held alongside the FTX and SALT Conference.
For one week (April 24-29th), ecosystem supporters mingled with some of the most influential crypto stakeholders (including Pyth’s contributors)! Many of you will remember our panels, including DeFi Building Blocks.
Meanwhile, at SALT, the Crypto Market Making and the Maturation of Digital Assets Panel saw a gathering of Pyth publishers: FTX, Jump Crypto, Hudson River Trading, and Susquehanna.
Chicago Terra Hacker House
Earlier this week (April 25th), the Chicago Terra Hacker House (“The Pit”) opened its doors to Lunatics developers for a whole month of building!
It was an honor to support this event alongside other crypto superpowers, including Jump Crypto, Terra, Galaxy Digital, Hashed, and Delphi Digital.
We look forward to seeing the innovations emerging from The Pit (including those leveraging Pyth’s price feeds!).
Pyth End-Users
We want to congratulate the Lifinity team on their fundraising! In less than a day, their community committed almost $10M!
Lifinity is the first proactive market maker with concentrated liquidity on Solana. Its objective is to improve capital efficiency and returns provided to liquidity providers. To achieve its goal, Lifinity leverages the Pyth network price feeds to rebalance its pools and prevent arbitrageurs from extracting value from the LPs.
We invite you to check out Lifinity’s Litepaper, released a few days ahead of their raise.
This is a rather original end-user (and we aim for many more to come shortly) as Tsunami Finance isn’t built upon Solana but rather atop Terra. Would this mean that the Pyth price feeds are already available on the Terra blockchain thanks to our dear friends at Wormhole? Take fate into your own hands! Read the docs.
Tsunami Finance is a spot and perpetual futures exchange that aims to provide a 0% slippage trading experience to users. In opposition to Solana protocols leveraging CLOB technology, Tsunami will use pools to enable trading and leverage a price oracle to determine the exact market pricing. We are looking forward to supporting many more innovative applications regardless of the blockchain they are built upon.
Pyth Publishers
Not a month goes by where Pyth does not attract more top-class data owners to the network. In April, Pyth welcomed two new publishers:
xbullion is a global network for the settlement of physical gold and silver bullion. It applies the benefits of blockchain to bring transparency, efficiency, and accessibility to users in order to access the largest bullion marketplaces in the world, and it does so without charging ongoing custody fees.
xbullion GOLD and xbullion SILV are tokenized precious metals on the blockchain. Each token is secured by 1 gram of physical gold or silver respectively and is directly owned by the token holder.
Profluent Trading is a global proprietary trading firm that leverages statistical and machine learning techniques to manage funds in the equities, futures, FX, and options markets around the world.
With a presence in Puerto Rico, Japan, Korea, and the UAE, Profluent covers all major trading hubs around the globe for 24/7 high-frequency trading.
Pyth network now has 55 publishers. This is still just the beginning, and we can’t wait to welcome additional data publishers. If you own some unique data, you know where to find us.
Pythian Community
Spaces & AMAs
Following a busy March (10 Twitter Space shows!), we continued meeting up with wonderful teams building the future of finance.
Our first one was with the Friktion team during which we talked about DOVs (Friktion has about $120M in TVL) and Entropy, the newly released perpetual platform offering power perpetual to users. The second space was held, as mentioned above, with Neptune: a borrow-lending protocol that won, among others, the $30K Solana Riptide Pyth prize.
Meanwhile, Mike Cahill, a Director of the Pyth Data Association, participated in an AMA organized by SolanaTW, a Taiwanese community-driven effort to spread Solana-related knowledge. SolanaTW gathers close to 10K members across Telegram and Medium. Find the complete AMA summary here.
That is all for our 16th 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 (and our Chinese Twitter). Join the Telegram, the Substack, or the Medium to learn more and send us any questions you may have.