Pythiad #9: Pyth On the March
Apr 1, 2022
Welcome to the 9th instalment of the Pythiad, the Pyth network newsletter!
To our followers: thank you for all your support and good vibes! And to our newcomers, we say welcome.
We are delighted to have you on board. As always, there’s much to discuss.
Coming Up
Pyth Developments
Pyth End-Users
Pyth Publishers
Pyth Metrics
Pythian Community
Pyth Developments
Solana Cookbook
The Solana Cookbook is a developer resource that provides the essential concepts and references for building applications on Solana. Each concept and reference focus on specific aspects of Solana’s development while providing additional details and usage examples.
Pyth is the second integration available in the Solana Cookbook (alongside Project Serum). Give it a read for an easy Pyth integration!
Pyth EMA
In addition to the ‘streaming’ price of an asset, the Pyth network offers applications a Pyth EMA price to further enable use cases. For example, Pyth’s averaging method is a variation of an Exponential Moving Average (EMA).
We chose EMA over an SMA because its computational efficiency is a good fit for on-chain applications. However, a basic EMA does not account for confidence intervals or missing data. Therefore, the current Pyth averaging method is a slot-weighted, inverse confidence-weighted exponential moving average of the aggregate price.
You can explore more in our dedicated blog post and documentation.
Pyth Client in Golang
Creating an entirely new market data referential — thanks to previously untapped composite market data — is just the beginning for Pyth!
Pyth’s next steps are to make this data widely available for all.
The first batch of libraries released was composed of Rust, JavaScript, and Python clients. Since then, incredible community builders have stepped up and carved new territory.
Richard Patel from Blockdaemon introduced a new library in Golang. The pyth-go library allows developers to access Pyth’s high-quality market data in near real-time from Golang applications. In addition, an open-source monitoring solution for fellow data publishers (or data hoarders and quant traders) is included. Check out Richard’s thread to see all the tooling he released!
Don’t forget the pyth-neon library, which provides a drop-in oracle replacement for Ethereum applications migrating to Solana!
As the Pyth.SolNet library, brought to you by Hoak!
Will you be the next heroic contributor? Whatever your journey, we all start with the docs.
New Feeds
Most platforms cannot support that specific asset without an oracle price reference. Pyth network will not stand for such a world!
Throughout March, the network has added three new feeds, with more to come:
$C98 is the native token of Coin98, which was founded as a DeFi product builder to create and develop an ecosystem of DeFi protocols, Web3 applications, and NFTs on different blockchains. Coin98 is continually looking for new methods to innovate products and expand its network. $C98 serves many functions, such as allowing holders to earn a portion of transaction fees, giving them membership discounts for products and services, and rewarding them for staking cryptocurrency.
$NEAR is the native token of the NEAR protocol: a sharded, proof-of-stake, layer-one blockchain that’s simple to use, secure, and scalable. NEAR has experienced significant traction in the past few months, and we expect to see DeFi protocols leveraging the NEAR/USD Pyth product as an oracle index in their perpetual protocols. Deploying a NEAR feed (and perhaps more feeds from the NEAR ecosystem itself) is just a first step. One day, you might just find your favorite Pyth feeds made available in the NEAR ecosystem too!
$FTM is Fantom’s native token, which currently sits in the top 50 crypto assets in market capitalization. Fantom is a high-performance, scalable, and secure smart-contract platform designed to overcome the limitations of previous generation blockchain platforms. Wormhole already supports Fantom, much like how Pyth supports $FTM. You know how the story goes…
Here’s a secret for our closest readers. If you want to figure out what the next supported feeds are, just take a look at our markets on testnet or devnet…
Pyth Users
Pyth data is natively available on Solana. Accordingly, Pyth’s data is permissionlessly queryable (no paywall exists on the blockchain).** If you are using Pyth data, we will not know unless you tell us. So if you want us to help you and broadcast your protocol or companies on our website, all is here.
Ribbon Finance
Ribbon Finance is an Ethereum-native protocol that creates structured crypto products for decentralized finance and is currently a leading ecosystem player with ~$230M in TVL. (Structured products are packaged financial instruments that use a combination of derivatives to achieve some specific risk-return objective).
Ribbon is expanding to Solana and, in partnership with Zeta Markets, is leveraging the Zeta FLEX program to automatically settle their vaults on Solana with Pyth’s price feeds.
New Publishers
Who are the newest additions to the growing Pythian community from March?
Amberdata
Amberdata delivers comprehensive data and insights into blockchain networks, crypto markets, and decentralized finance, as well as empowers financial institutions with data for research, trading, risk, analytics, reporting, and compliance.
Existing partners of Amberdata are LMAX, Coinbase, Kraken, Bitfinex and Binance among others.
ML Tech
ML Tech was founded in 2020 in Chicago, Illinois, by Leo Mindyuk (CEO) and Markus Leballeux (CTO).
ML Tech allows researchers to test and execute their strategies with institutional investors looking for novel strategies to deploy their capital.
In 2021, ML Tech’s monthly trading volume grew 57 times: from $42M to $2.4B.
Wintermute
Wintermute is a proprietary trading firm in digital assets, active across over 60 centralized and decentralized exchanges, with daily volumes over $5bn.
The firm facilitates OTC trading in spot and derivatives for over 250 tokens.
Being a very active player in the blockchain ecosystem, Wintermute supports several high-profile blockchain projects with investment, integrations, co-development, and partnerships.
Wintermute was founded in 2017 by Optiver alumni, where CEO Evgeny Gaevoy was head of ETF market making.
Raydium
Raydium was among the first AMMs to go live on Solana in early 2021. Since then, Raydium has established itself as the Solana leading AMM with about $600M of Total Value Locked and over $43B in volume traded.
Currently, 35 trading pairs on Raydium have over $2.5M in liquidity and 60 over $1M.
Optiver
With 35+ years of global market-making experience, the firm was founded by Johann Kaemingk in 1986 as an options market maker on the European Options Exchange (known as Euronext).
As a market maker, Optiver trades derivatives, cash equities, bonds, forex, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
Kaiko
Kaiko was founded in 2014 to become the foundation of the new digital finance economy by serving as a single source for market information from both centralized and decentralized marketplaces.
Kaiko collects data from over 100 centralized and decentralized exchanges, makes 100 million API calls per week, and supports +120,000 spot, futures, and options data points.
Aquanow
Aquanow is a leading infrastructure and liquidity provider that enables institutional and enterprise use-cases for digital assets.
Each month, billions pass through the platform enabling a broad range of financial services for the world’s fastest-growing financial institutions, fintech platforms, and global companies.
Geneva Trading
Geneva Trading is a leading principal trading firm with a history of consistent success in the derivatives markets. Founded in 1999, the firm fosters an environment of innovation, entrepreneurship, and a disciplined approach to trading and investing.
With offices in Chicago and Dublin, the firm prides itself in having core foundational pillars of prominent businesses in trading, market-making, and risk management.
You can always review the full roster of data publishers on the Pyth website here.
Pyth Metrics
Total Value Secured
One of the most important metrics is the Total Value Secured (TVS) by the Pyth’s price feeds. Price feeds are crucial for your operations, whether you are a borrow-lending protocol or a synthetics platform.
At the end of March 2022, Pyth feeds were securing about $2B!
Pyth data is natively available on Solana and (therefore) permissionlessly queryable. We may not be aware of every single program leveraging Pyth!
When possible, smart contracts are verified in-depth to confirm whether they’re using Pyth data. This is part of running fair assessments. But otherwise, if you are using Pyth data, let us know! We are happy to support and broadcast you on the Pyth website!
Trading Volume
Consider the amount of trading volume dependent on Pyth data. Each protocol has its Pyth integration: perpetual contracts using a CLOB or a vAMM use Pyth as their index reference to set the funding rate. Synthetics platforms use Pyth price feeds as the exchange rate basis for swaps in between synthetic assets. Finally, futures or options protocols (specifically DOVs) integrate Pyth feeds for their derivatives settlement.
To date, Pyth has enabled over $3.7B in volume traded.
Publishers
Data is king, and the Pyth network stands committed to onboarding only high-quality data sources and establishing a natural bridge — without intermediaries — between these sources and the end-users.
The Pyth network currently has 53 publishers!
NPM & Rust Downloads
Pyth network is open-sourced, and its data is freely queryable.
You can check Pyth’s adoption rate by looking at NPM and Rust 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.
A (Rust) crate is a binary or library. The crate root is a source file that the Rust compiler starts from and makes up the root module of your crate. This enables you to call on-chain data and make your protocol works.
Pyth in 2022 seems to be taking on an ‘up only’ trend…
Pyth Community
The Pyth community knows no borders!
NYC Solana Hacker House
Since day 1, we have been building Pyth in the open. By this ethos, Pyth’s contributors are no strangers to hacker houses.
Did you catch us at the NYC Solana Hacker House earlier this month (Mar 14–18)?
We had the pleasure of meeting the builders among you at the Solana Bootcamp (Mar 7–11) too, a six-day offline event with in-person guidance and mentorship from Solana Labs engineers and Wormhole, Jump Crypto, Multicoin Capital!
FIA-PTG Conference
At the same time, the Pyth network was also on-site for the FIA Principal Traders Group Conference in Boca Raton, Florida (Mar 15–17) as a Platinum sponsor. Other Platinum sponsors included Pyth contributors: DRW Cumberland, FTX, and Jump!
This is the first major ‘post-pandemic’ TradFi conference, and it’s long overdue! There was lots of excitement, and we had a wonderful time connecting with current and prospective Pyth supporters! Word on the street: a new data publisher revealed its future participation in Pyth live on stage…
For a recap of the conference, we recommend The Block article by Frank Chaparro.
If you like drawing, painting, meming, or taking quizzes be sure to join us in our Discord to partake in those events and have a chance to win some prizes.
This is the end of Pythiad #9!
We can’t wait to hear what you think! You can join the Pyth Discord and Telegram, follow us on Twitter, and be the first to hear about what’s new in the Pyth ecosystem through our newsletter. You can also learn more about Pyth here.
