Pythiad #6: 2021 in Review — 2022 in Sight
Welcome to the 6th installment of the Pythiad, the Pyth Network newsletter!
For those who missed Pythiad #1, Pythiad #2, Pythiad #3, Pythiad #4 or Pythiad #5 be sure to check them out. We covered just about the entire history of Pyth network!
To our followers: thank you for all your support, feedback, and good vibes! And to our newcomers, we say welcome.
We are delighted to have you on board for 2022. But first, what has Pyth been up to in December 2021?
Coming up
- Pyth Metrics
- Pyth Network Developments
- Our Publishers
- Pythian Community
Pyth Metrics
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 data sources, and establishing a direct bridge — without any middlemen — between these sources and the blockchain.
By the close of 2021, 41 data providers have joined the network. We leave it to the community to guess how many publishers Pyth will have by the end of 2022!
Price Feeds
On-chain protocols need sustainable price references, which means they need oracle services. Pyth is here to deliver, and now offers 57 data feeds across the major asset classes (equities, FX, crypto, commodities). And there’s more where that came from.
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: expect more and more price feeds for all your favourite assets, plus expanded asset class coverage for 2022!
Integrations
Pyth data is free and permissionless. Check out who’s 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 its 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 to their index mechanism. 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 and synthetics trading platforms: Mango Markets, Drift, Bonfida, 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’.
Twitter Followers
Some argue that if something was not picked up by CT (Crypto Twitter), then it never really happened. A bit tongue in cheek, but clout is clout. Let us visualize Pyth’s monthly follower count and note the healthy uptrend. We are very grateful to everyone who is already accompanying us on our journey towards transparent, accessible and HiFi data. Think about what’s next for Pyth! “You’re still early”, as they say. If you haven’t already, now is the time to get your friends and family on board with the Pyth network.
Substack Subscribers
Substack is another way to stay in the loop about Pyth. Anyone can subscribe to the Pyth bi-weekly newsletter. You choose your preferred social media channel, and we’ll meet you there.
Pyth Network Developments
Since the Pythiad #5 (which focused on our new aggregation method), Pyth network has been active across various fronts: partnerships, development, community events.
Some updates were lowkey. For 2022, we want everyone to be on the same page. Going forward, we will regularly report on all your favorite Pyth happenings.
Website Wonders
Have you noticed a new tab on our website?
The Consumers page is the official roster of those who chose the HiFi life and is leveraging Pyth price feeds for their mainnet protocol.
This will sound surprising, but it’s not always easy identifying who is using Pyth’s feeds!
Pyth code is open-sourced; Pyth’s data is freely queryable. It becomes difficult to comprehensively map what the network and its market data are used for. On-chain programs, when open-sourced, are easy to identify (though we are very sorry if we missed you!), but closed source on-chain or off-chain programs are harder to spot.
Are you using Pyth data? Let us know! We don’t want to miss you! We opened a form (also available on the Consumer page). Let us know that you are composing with Pyth and get featured on our website!
New Data Feeds
Without an oracle price reference, most platforms cannot support that specific asset, and value is lost. Pyth network will not stand for such a world. Throughout December, the network has continually added new and hotly demanded feeds:
- ALGO/USD (Crypto)
- AVAX/USD (Crypto)
- FIDA/USD (Crypto)
- MATIC/USD (Crypto)
- ORCA/USD (Crypto)
- PORT/USD (Crypto)
- SLND/USD (Crypto)
- stSOL/USD (Crypto)
That’s 8 new crypto feeds with immediate use cases!
AVAX and MATIC have been long sought by trading protocols as these tokens bring massive volumes (and upside pricing). SLND, PORT, ORCA, and stSOL have found their place across borrow-lending platforms, while FIDA is now leveraged as a reference for the booming Solana Name Service auction.
We look forward to continue expanding the reach and coverage of the Pyth network. And we have an exciting pipeline of new data publishers: think equities! Think FX! Think LP tokens and more ‘obscure’ tokens!
Stick around in January to see who will join the Pythian ship.
Moar power to you! The new Pyth client
Pyth network is constantly improving its on-chain client library.
A new version of our on-chain client library has been released. Check out the GitHub repo here and further details here.
This update delivers some highly-requested features.
First, it lets you price assets against currencies other than USD. Applications can now price mSOL/SOL by combining mSOL/USD and SOL/USD!
Second, the update lets you price baskets of tokens. For example, applications can now price LP tokens (e.g., BTC/ETH LP with 0.1 BTC and 0.05 ETH) using the BTC/USD and ETH/USD price feeds. Taken together, these features allow applications to price a huge number of additional products. Custom creation of LP token pricing is now available to builders.
Developer questions? Join our Discord or Telegram, we’re always happy to help. You can also check out the docs.
Pyth x Neon Labs
Pyth price feeds are now available to all protocols using Neon Lab’s EVM.
This implementation empowers any Ethereum application deployed on Solana via Neon EVM to access Pyth network’s high fidelity price feeds.
Neon EVM is a tool that allows Ethereum-like transactions to be processed on Solana, taking full advantage of the functionality native to Solana, including the ability to execute transactions in parallel.
As such, Neon EVM allows dApps to operate with the low gas fees, high transaction speeds, and high throughput made possible by Solana, as well as access to the growing Solana market. Prominent protocols like Aave and SushiSwap have announced that they will port their protocols to Solana via Neon. Learn more about Neon Labs here.
EVM developers can look forward to more than just pricing data: Pyth is a new type of oracle that also provides a confidence interval value alongside price data. The confidence interval specifies how much precision or uncertainty there is in a single observation, enabling developers to customize their protocol’s handling of incoming pricing data for safer and more precise operations. Check out both our blog post on confidence and the Best Practices guide.
We released two interfaces in the pyth-neon GitHub repo for reading Pyth data via Neon EVM.
The Pyth Native Interface provides access to all the Pyth-specific features, including confidence intervals.
The second interface is designed to be familiar to EVM developers and replicates the Chainlink Data Feeds API — excluding the historical API.
While the second interface provides an instant solution for EVM dApps to retrieve HiFi off-chain data, we strongly recommend builders to leverage the Pyth Native Interface. Implementing the Pyth confidence interval can further protect your users from unusual market conditions and deliver a more refined product: Zeta Markets’ Options Settlement design is a prime example.
What now? BUIDL! If you are a protocol looking to deploy your code on Neon EVM, feel free to reach out via Discord or Telegram. We are always more than happy to help your team integrate with a HiFi next-gen oracle network that will supercharge what you’re building.
See you soon on Solana, where DeFi participants can now interact with their preferred EVM native app for a fraction of a cent!
Pyth Docs: https://docs.pyth.network/
NeonLabs Docs: https://docs.neon-labs.org/
Pyth Neon Docs: https://github.com/pyth-network/pyth-neon
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.
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.
Pythian Community
The last community shoutout of the year should be dedicated to Solana, without which, many of the things we do at Pyth would not be feasible.
Here is the 2021 Solana recap!
https://twitter.com/solana/status/1473392576095006724
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 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.
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 your presence. We are excited to see you there!
NFT Bounty / Miami Hacker House
Pyth sponsored a prize as part of the Miami Hacker House. The theme was NFTs, so Pyth put up an NFT-related bounty — the first milestone on our way towards Pyth feeds for NFTs.
Quokka was announced as the winner of the Solana Hacker House Pyth Bounty Prize! They had a complete, well-documented solution that read NFT prices from all 6 major exchanges and pushed them to the Pyth network.
Socials
A couple of new entrants to the Pythian community!
Please give your warmest welcome to the Pyth Intern! From spicy takes to pure alpha, do not fade again the 2021 trend of following the Interns! The intern also chose to kick doors down and make a grand self-introduction on the 25th of December. What could this mean?
Proof of Intern: https://twitter.com/PythIntern/status/1474446154913959941
Pyth is also going international. Well, Pyth has always been international, as Discord Pythians would know. The venues expand: a new channel for Chinese-speaking Pythians has been established: the Pyth Chinese Telegram Channel — join the fun here.
Be sure to also check out the official Pyth Chinese Medium channel and the Pyth Chinese Twitter.
We have more regional coverage in mind, so just you wait!
Here are all the places you can currently follow us, interact and keep updated on all Pyth related things:
What’s next?
Many things, depending on your situation, but the one common point is BUIDL!
The Pyth network has been busy preparing for the 1st semester of 2021.
Will your dreams be fulfilled in 2022? We leave it to your imagination, and to be quite honest, we have in mind these same things too…
Community-wise, you will experience a Pyth network much more active throughout our socials!
Development-wise, you will see a Pyth network very different from today (protocol operations, data publishers, users, and more). The vision is coming to life.
Something, something Whitepaper, something, something wen token?, and so many other things…
This is the end of Pythiad #6!
Pythiad #1: The Journey so Far
Pythiad #2: Liberating First-Party Data
Pythiad #3: Pyth Laboured in September
Pythiad #4: Ignition at a glance
Pythiad #5: Last straight before 2022
Future newsletters will continue to summarize Pyth’s monthly progress and exciting things happening in our ecosystem. They will be sweet, succinct, and pithy.
Thank you for reading!
