#5 All eyes on Solana
Welcome to the 5th issue of the Pyth substack: HiFi for DeFi. Today's blog covers the exciting ongoing Solana Ignition Hackathon. We also revisit some of the prior projects from the last hackathon!
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
Solana Ignition Hackathon
Pyth has been running since April this year and we are now sponsoring our second Solana Hackathon. After the Solana Season Hackathon in May, here we are again. We’re excited to see the results of everyone’s hard work as the Solana Ignition Hackathon concludes today on October 15th!
During the first hackathon, Pyth was only available on Solana devnet, and the website was unveiled for that occasion! To inspire the participating protocols at that time, Pyth sponsored a prize track of $25K (won by the Solfarm.io team). If you want to jump back in time, you may review our Pythiad #1 or Twitter thread in which we highlight all the builders from this hackathon.
Another Pyth prize is up for grabs for Ignition. This time, $30K will be awarded to the best integration using Pyth network’s HiFi price feeds. Even if you only started building on Solana testnet or devnet for the hackathon, leveraging Pyth network will enable you to launch your protocol as soon as you want on Solana mainnet too. We look forward to everyone’s submissions!
We are also eager to see some of you during Solana Breakpoint in Lisbon from November 7–10th.
The Pyth network now proudly has over thirty committed data providers, each ultimately helping to enable these exciting projects to be born using the most robust oracle available.
Protocols Updates
Following the hackathon mention above, the first four protocols below partook in the previous Solana hackathon (May-June 2021) and should be taken as examples given that they now gather hundreds of millions of assets on their platforms. This fast-paced development, from test/devnet to a mainnet release, as well as their success in finding a market fit and users has been astonishing. We hope to see the new protocols rising from the Ignition Hackathon reach the same success. For those newcomers, be sure to have a look at our docs and best practice guide.
On October 7th, Jet Protocol went live on Solana mainnet. DeFitizens may now lend and borrow 4 assets on the Jet app. In a week, Jet has gathered about $35M in total value locked. We also encourage you to partake in the development of the platform itself on the JetForum as you will have the ability to make your voice count for new assets supported and many other topics. Jet Protocol native token ($JET) has been issued during an IEO on Ascendex on October 13th.
In our 2nd newsletter (mid-August), we presented you Port Finance as they were just launching on Solana mainnet leveraging Pyth feeds for their borrow/lending platform. Two months later, Port Finance TVL has grown by more than 100x: from $2.5M to $300M. As you supply your assets on the platform, you will also be rewarded in Port Finance native token $PORT.
Project Larix is also a borrow/lending protocol available on the Solana mainnet since early September. It has experienced a rapid adoption as in less than 45 days, Larix TVL is now over $300M. Lenders on the platform will also enjoy a liquidity mining program that rewards participants with the platform native token ($LARIX). One uncommon feature offered by Project Larix is for anyone to be a liquidator of unhealthy borrowings. Once the debt ratio of a position reaches 100%, anyone is able to liquidate the borrower's position and be rewarded.
As for Port, Solend was broadcasted in our 2nd newsletter (mid-August). This borrow lending protocol on Solana has enjoyed a substantial growth of its TVL, from $3M in mid-August to $200M currently. Solend is also taking part in the ongoing Solana hackathon with a $30K prize — the team even suggested some ideas to prospective builders. If you want to stay on top of this autonomous interest rate machine, we advise you to follow up on their Twitter APY bot.
On October 5th, Synthetify, a simple and decentralized protocol for synthetic assets was released on Solana mainnet. In only 10 days, Synthetify has already gathered almost $15M in assets staked on the platform and just recorded its highest daily volume traded. To get a better understanding of the platform and the various manners to interact with it, we highly recommend you to give a look at their blog!
Mango Markets is a user-friendly, fully on-chain, decentralized trading platform enabling margin trading on limit order books as well as perpetual futures. Mango is fully committed to its community and a complete decentralized governance hence you may find the ongoing topics of discussion on their forum as well as past and ongoing votes on their DAO-Beta platform. Mango perps currently have about $8M in open interest with only $BTC and $SOL available.
New Providers
In the past couple of weeks, Pyth has, once again, welcomed two new participants that will provide high-quality and first-party data to the network.
Founded in 2019 by diverse members of the global financial community, Members Exchange is an innovative, customer-centric market operator, focused on creating and promoting a fair, transparent, and efficient experience for all investors.
The exchange commenced trading on September 21, 2020, and offers a new option to investors, with a simpler platform and features to benefit both retail and institutional investors.
Founded in 2004, Flow Traders is a leading global financial technology-enabled liquidity provider in financial products.
Historically specializing in Exchange Traded Products (ETPs), Flow Traders now ensures the provision of liquidity to support the uninterrupted functioning of financial markets across multiple asset classes, enabling investors to continuously buy or sell ETPs or other financial instruments under all market circumstances.
MEMX, bringing strong exchange expertise and innovation, will help the Pyth network scale by providing robust, trusted, and verifiable equities market data on-chain ; while Flow Traders, one of the strongest market participants in Europe, will initially provide crypto asset data to the Pyth network, with plans to expand across asset classes as the Pyth network continues to expand.
The Pyth network has been and will continue to onboard some of the biggest trading firms & exchanges as data providers, as they own data with granularity and quality that is traditionally guarded by the largest, centralized gatekeepers of the financial world.
As so many prominent partners join us in our quest to bring HiFi to DeFi, it only felt normal to showcase this incredible roster on our website with our Publishers tab.
That's all for our 5th 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, join the Telegram and the Substack or the Medium to learn more, and ask any questions you may have.
Jhhhf