Welcome to the New Market Data Economy: Unlocking the Price of Everything for Everyone
Jul 24, 2025
Your trades don’t suck. Your data does.
Whether you’re building an app, managing a portfolio, or checking the price of a stock, you’re being blocked from crucial information that bars you from a fair shot at building wealth.
That’s because market data is invisible—and so are the ways it’s weaponized against you.
Real prices—the ones that move markets, inform critical decisions, and determine life-changing opportunities—are hidden behind terminals, delayed by intermediaries, and sold to the highest bidder. Billions of people are trading, investing, and building on incomplete data. Or worse: they’re locked out entirely.
But this isn’t an accident; it’s the way things are designed.
What if there's a better way? What if there was a single source of truth that made the real price of everything available to everyone, everywhere?
Since day one, the Pyth contributors have focused on addressing this inequity through the network's single mission: creating a global price layer where anyone with an internet connection can tap into data from the world’s top institutions and global markets.
The next wave of finance doesn’t begin with a new app or token. It begins with equal access to the most important input in the system itself: price.
Your Trades Aren’t the Problem—Your Data Is
Price is at the foundation of every financial decision. It determines what you buy, sell, borrow, lend, insure, or invest in. It’s the primary signal through which markets communicate, and it’s used across everything from algorithmic trades to risk models to your everyday investment app.
And yet, access to price is still a luxury—especially when it matters most:
In traditional markets, retail traders are still served 15–20 minute delayed quotes—unless they pay to upgrade.
In crypto, builders and users rely on public APIs with unknown sources, unreliable uptime, and missing assets.
In the institutional world, traders and builders face fragmented data feeds and rising costs, while emerging and internet financial markets are left out entirely. This restricts the types of solutions that everyday users can access.
This broken model creates a two-tiered system:
Those who can pay for speed, coverage, and accuracy
Everyone else who’s left trading on guesswork and lagging signals
Whether you’re trading from Manhattan or Mumbai, the outcome is still the same: if you don't have access to elite data, you’re flying blind.
The System Was Built to Lock You Out
Over the last two decades, exchanges and data aggregators have transformed market data into a $50B+ annual revenue machine, reselling the same pricing information over and over through layers of licensing, redistribution, and arbitrary access rules.
Since 2008, exchanges alone have earned over $7.6B in market data fees, often with no correlation between what they charge and what the data is actually worth. These structural tolls were designed to dictate who gets to participate and how effectively they get to play the game.
And the price for access just keeps climbing: according to industry analyses, the cost of market data has increased more than 15x over the past 25 years.
This might sound like a niche problem, but it deeply impacts how every financial product you touch is built, priced, and delivered. From the apps in your pocket to the assets in your portfolio, broken data economics affect everyone in the following ways:
You can’t see the fine print designed to lock you out
Negotiating access to institutional-grade data feeds can take months—and adding new symbols or markets often requires separate approvals or contracts, slowing market access for everyone.
Exchanges often charge redistributors like Bloomberg and Refinitiv extra for data licenses—costs that get passed down to retail apps and, eventually, to you
Whether you’re a fintech startup or a Web3 builder, you’re paying hidden markups on data that’s supposed to be public.
You’re paying more to get the same incomplete data
Nasdaq’s market data revenue grew from roughly $270 million in 2012 to over $600 million in 2023, more than doubling in a little over a decade while also outpacing inflation and trading volume growth.
Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the NYSE, generated $1.4 billion in 2023 from its data and connectivity segment, highlighting how infrastructure access has become a core revenue driver.
These rising costs are a core feature of the exchanges’ business model that extracts more value every year while they deliver the same product to their end users.
Your zip code shouldn’t determine your access to data
In the US, under Reg NMS, brokers are allowed to withhold real-time quotes from retail users—unless they pay a premium to unlock them.
In emerging markets, local brokerages and apps often lack the budget or licensing rights for global market data, leaving users without live prices for key assets like SPY or EUR/USD.
Where you live and who you are determines how and what you're able to trade.
You know it’s a problem when regulators are worried
Policymakers in the UK and EU have raised concerns that current market data practices are stifling competition, hindering innovation, and weakening financial sector resilience.
A report from Market Structure Partners concluded that there is no functioning market for market data—just monopoly pricing set unilaterally by exchanges, without transparent benchmarks.
If regulators are worried, users should be too. Innovation stalls, transparency fades, and the cost of entry only rises.
From the trading desk at a bank to the “buy” button on a retail app, the current market data economy is not optimized for transparency or efficiency; it was built solely for centralized control and revenue capture.
It’s Time to Rewrite the Market Data Economy
By collecting the price of everything—from crypto and equities to FX, ETFs, and commodities—and making it available in real time across 100+ blockchains, Pyth is establishing a single, global source of truth for market data.
Here’s what that looks like:
Trust: Data that's transparent and direct
Pyth prices come directly from the source—top exchanges, market makers, and trading firms—not public APIs or third-party aggregators.
Contributors stake tokens and are held accountable through Oracle Integrity Staking.
Everyone sees the same price, at the same time. It’s transparent, verifiable, and tamper-resistant.
Experience: Get one real-time integration at a low cost
Pyth offers a single integration point across every major blockchain, including L1s, L2s, and appchains.
Data is updated in milliseconds, making it suitable for HFT, real-time execution, and risk management.
No unnecessary fees—just composable infrastructure.
Availability: Access every asset class, 24/7
Pyth supports a growing range of symbols across crypto, stocks, FX, ETFs, commodities, rates, and more.
It’s the only price layer delivering consistent feeds across both on-chain and off-chain markets.
It’s accessible anytime, anywhere there’s an internet connection.
Pyth turns fragmented, paywalled market data into a universally accessible price layer—one that works as fast, openly, and universally as the internet itself.
A New Model for Fair Access
The difference between the old model and the Pyth model comes down to one thing: who gets access and who gets paid.
The traditional system:
Traders generate data but earn nothing from it.
Exchanges extract billions in fees while restricting access.
Data redistributors charge insane prices and return very little value to contributors.
What Pyth unlocks:
Traders and exchanges earn rewards for publishing data to Pyth.
Anyone can access this real-time, high-fidelity price feeds in milliseconds.
The data layer is open infrastructure, not a gatekept product.
The old model extracts, while Pyth rewards.
Without Pyth:
Retail investors trade on stale, delayed prices, usually without even knowing it.
Builders face licensing hurdles, limited data availability, and stale data, forcing them to copy existing markets instead of launching new ones.
Institutions pay escalating fees for fragmented, low-transparency feeds and still can’t reach emerging on-chain markets.
With Pyth:
Everyone sees the same live prices at the same time, across every chain.
Builders plug into real-time, composable data across asset classes, without licensing friction or redistributor tolls.
Institutions monetize their proprietary data and tap into a growing global network of DeFi apps, rollups, and appchains.
Pyth transforms how data is distributed, monetized, and used. It replaces a 20th-century toll booth model with real-time, transparent infrastructure built for an internet-native financial system.
The result is a world where everyone—regardless of capital, geography, or status—can build, trade, and invest on common ground.
What’s Live Today and What’s Coming Next
Pyth is already the leading market data provider in crypto, serving over 550 apps and platforms.
The mission to bring the price of everything, everywhere is already in motion. To date, Pyth has:
Secured $1T+ in trading volume
Amassed 1,600+ symbols across multiple asset classes
Been deployed across 100+ blockchains
Sourced data from 120+ institutions and trusted publishers
These milestones are the first signals of what’s next. Pyth is expanding into every asset class—and over time, it will expand across every corner of the global financial system.
What if everyone had access to the price of everything?
That’s the vision that Pyth is bringing into reality. The foundation for a new economy is closer than ever, and it’s all happening one price feed at a time.
