#9 Pyth 2021 metrics to kickstart 2022
Welcome to the 9th issue of the Pyth newsletter: HiFi for DeFi. For the first time in the short but amazing history of Pyth, this edition will bring to you some of the key Pyth metrics!
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.
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Pyth End of Year Review
2021 has been a year full of excitement, surprises, learning, and surpassing milestones.
We are deeply grateful towards the whole Pythian community — from our beloved members across all our social channels, to our data partners who have been publishing their proprietary market data for months, to our integration partners who continue to build incredible solutions alongside us!
From the bottom of our hearts: Thank you! We cannot wait to tackle 2022 together with all of you.
Data Providers Onboarded
Data is king, and the Pyth network stands committed to onboarding only high-quality first-party data sources and establishing a direct bridge — without any middlemen — between these sources and the blockchain. Pyth’s publishers are the bedrock of our community and have helped ensure this oracle is at the very core infrastructure of DeFi.
By the close of 2021, an incredible 41 data providers have joined the network, across the world’s most prominent trading firms, global exchanges, and crypto native companies. Not only do these firms have strong data to contribute to the network, but they also stand alongside us in a belief of DeFi and Web3, and we could not be more excited to work alongside them. We leave it to you to guess how many publishers Pyth will have by the end of 2022!
Price Feeds
On-chain protocols need sustainable and reliable price references, which means they need a strong oracle. Pyth is here to deliver, and now offers 57 data feeds across the major asset classes (equities, FX, crypto, commodities).
As the bull run kicked in, hundreds of new shiny tokens emerged across countless chains and DEX’s. One of Pyth’s core tenets is sourcing only from first-party data to populate its feeds. This means that some extra leg work is required to bring certain assets onto Pyth. The network is on it: stay tuned for a continued expansion both in the number of symbols and asset classes supported during 2022!
Integrations
Pyth data is free and permissionless. Check out who’s already building with Pyth!
Shockingly, it's a full-time job to identify the whole roster of the Pyth users. (We discuss this in-depth below).
The metrics below include all known on-chain dApps composing with Pyth; sometimes, a team using Pyth data may not tell us. (If this is the case for you, let us know here and we’ll get you featured).
From an integrations perspective, one segment the crypto community may oversee is off-chain applications needing pricing data in their own environment: this is a segment we expect to see a strong uptick in 2022 thanks to Pyth’s unique offering and quality assurance.
In addition, Wormhole will soon bring Pyth data to many more blockchains, and we are thrilled to see this play out. Meanwhile, in the ETH universe, developers building with Neon Lab’s EVM can already access Pyth’s feeds!
Total Value Secured
On top of the number of integrations, another valuable metric is the total dollar amount which is powered/secured by Pyth market data. Thanks to the success of many superstar Solana protocols, Pyth has reached over $1B in TVS! This is only the beginning for the Pythian community and is nevertheless a symbolic start to an exciting year.
Trading Volume
TVS often refers to borrow-lending and other protocols locking assets for specific actions. There is another major industry segment utilizing Pyth’s HiFi data: the trading ecosystem on Solana, which trusts Pyth to provide fast and reliable market data. Every protocol has its own Pyth integration approach: vAMMs solely rely on Pyth for pricing and funding rates (oracle price versus market price), while orderbook-based DEXs leverage an oracle only for the funding rate. Solana is known for unique and powerful perpetuals or synthetics trading platforms: Mango Markets, Drift, Bonfida and Synthetify. In December alone, they have seen about $2.5B in volumes traded.
NPM Downloads
Pyth network is open-sourced and its data is freely queryable. These features make it less than straightforward to comprehensively map what the network and its market data are used for. Another easy way to check on Pyth network’s adoption rate is to look up the NPM downloads. NPM (“Node Package Manager”) is the default package manager for JavaScript’s runtime Node.js, which is needed whenever you want to integrate Pyth on your website frontend. Something has been awakening across December, and the trend looks something like ‘up only’.
Building Together in 2022
Serum x Wormhole Hackathon
Long-time Pythians are aware of our love for hackathons, the on-ramp for the next billion-dollar projects (and most of Pyth’s integration partners!). Hackathons enable newcomers and their big dreams to transform their ideas into real-life solutions that benefit millions of people.
It is with great pleasure for the network to support Convergence, the Wormhole and Serum Hackathon.
Wormhole is our data ramp from Solana to the whole DeFi world. (See our initial blog post here).
Since its release (for now only tokens can be bridged) Wormhole has been a massive success with billions of dollars bridged across supported chains (Solana, Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, BSC, Terra, and soon, Oasis).
Project Serum is also a key Pyth stakeholder, as well as one of the 41 already announced data providers. Serum markets have the unique ability to share common liquidity across various frontends; Serum enables institutional-grade deep liquidity on Solana and thereby supports many existing feeds on Pyth.
Pyth is sponsoring a prize for the Convergence Hackathon: check out the details. Convergence will accept project submissions from Jan 5–31, 2022 with up to $5M in prizes and seed funding. Prizes exist for integrating with Pyth, Wormhole, Serum, PsyOptions, Terra, and Atrix.
On the Pyth front, we will be looking for projects that utilize Pyth’s data infrastructure and build new solutions that solve problems in the DeFi space for individual traders and institutions. What do you want to build? Our expectations, although high, are flexible! Submissions that are extremely innovative, though outside of this above scope, could also win the Pyth prize.
During this hackathon, we will have a live session called Pyth: Under the hood that will enable anyone to catch up quickly on how to use Pyth. The session will be led by Jayant Krishnamurthy at 1–2 PM EST on January 11th.
Details can be found here.
Chicago Hacker House
The Pyth network will also be on-site in Chicago, USA on January 17–21 to partake in the Chicago Hacker House, as we host our own private workshop for the data provider community. It will be a really exciting week in Chicago as projects are born, synergies molded, and community ties strengthen. The Solana Hacker House kickstarted in Lisbon, Portugal, was followed by a Miami edition: both events gained incredible momentum. Chicago may be a bit frosty, but things will warm up very quickly, especially with Pyth’s firey momentum. We are excited to see you there!
Our Publishers
In 2021, the Pyth network has relentlessly worked to get prominent financial providers — trading firms, exchanges, and crypto companies — to collaborate on one project. The network shares one grand common goal: democratizing market data. It has been amazing to see this roster grow so quickly and effectively, but we know the work is just beginning.
The crypto world, where a majority of its data is free and available to anyone (for now at least), is an outlier within the greater financial data universe. Participants in traditional markets often need to pay millions to centralized (and inefficient) parties just to get an accurate glimpse of what is happening on the markets.
In the last 9 months, Pyth’s line-up of publishers have pushed the network to the edge of becoming the worldwide #1 reference for first-party (that is, proprietary) financial data that is publicly available to anyone for free.
We would like to deeply thank our 41 announced publishers, as they are the backbone of the network. Without them and future joiners, the Pyth network could not aim to reach its grand goal.
If you want to join this cohort and help shape the future of market data distribution, please reach out to business@pyth.network.
New Publishers
Who are the newest additions to the growing Pythian community from December?
Talos is a leading institutional-grade infrastructure technology provider that supports the full lifecycle of digital asset trading, from price discovery to execution through to settlement.
Engineered by a team with unmatched experience in building institutional trading systems, the platform is trusted by many of the world’s largest market participants, using it to forge bi-lateral relationships with all members of the crypto trading ecosystem.
Founded in 2018, Talos has rapidly scaled its business since announcing its platform last October. In May, Talos announced the completion of a $40 million Series A investment round led by Andreessen Horowitz and investments from PayPal Ventures, Fidelity Investments, Galaxy Digital, Elefund, Illuminate Financial, and STEADFAST Capital Ventures.
JST Capital is a global digital asset financial services firm servicing institutional investors, blockchain companies, banks, and broker-dealers.
With operations in the United States and Singapore, the Company provides sophisticated trade execution, asset optimization, treasury services, and consulting services to facilitate liquidity.
JST entered the crypto markets as early as 2014, when they began to make markets for one of the early blockchain projects. Leveraging that experience, JST was launched in 2018 to provide a full suite of traditional financial services to institutions in the digital asset market.
To see all our first-party data providers, check our Publishers page.
That is all for our 9th 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.