How Pyth powers DEXs like DESK
Discover how DESK leveraged Pyth’s real-time prices to quickly become a leading leveraged trading platform on Arbitrum.
DESK, previously known as HMX, looked to offer the most advanced risk management protocol while providing best-in-class experience and capital efficiency. This objective requires a solution that enables pricing of risk and the DESK platform to scale without compromising on security.
DESK delivers a multi-collateral, cross-margin protocol by leveraging high-speed, high-fidelity price data from diverse sources. This foundation enables permissionless access to robust risk management—balancing performance with fairness and security.
By integrating with Pyth price feeds, DESK now powers a multi-asset cross-margin system with secure, verifiable, low-latency data. This infrastructure enables faster execution, stronger risk management, and a more scalable DeFi trading experience.
DESK: Setting the new DEX benchmark
Discover how DESK used Pyth's comprehensive and real-time price data to quickly emerge as a leading leveraged trading platform on Arbitrum, offering both multi-collateral support and cross-margining capabilities.
“Pyth Network has been our exclusive oracle service provider…since day one. Their remarkable technology, rapid market deployment, and receptive approach to incorporating team feedback have been pivotal reasons for our continued partnership with them.” — Shu Tsu Wei, Head of Engineering
Context: Building margin trading on-chain
Fair pricing and robust collateral management are essential to enabling capital-efficient margin trading in DeFi. DESK was the only pool-based perpetuals protocol on Arbitrum offering both cross-margining and support for multi-asset collateral—allowing users to manage risk and capital allocation dynamically.
These features demand reliable, real-time price data to protect the protocol from volatility while maintaining a smooth user experience. This case study examines how Pyth helped DESK achieve scalable, decentralized margin trading with broader asset access and stronger risk controls.
Challenge: Achieving fair trading and secure cross-margining
Traders in DeFi margin markets demand platforms that offer competitive, CEX-aligned pricing and flexible leverage across diverse collateral—without over-allocating capital. Perpetual contracts enable high leverage—often up to 100x—and generate significant fees on the notional value of trades, making perpetual DEXs attractive for both traders and liquidity providers.
To capture this opportunity, protocols must deliver fair pricing, robust risk controls, and scalable market design. But historically, DEXs have relied on slow or internally maintained oracles that expose users to front-running, back-running, and adverse selection.
For DESK, the challenge was to support multi-collateral cross-margining while minimizing latency-related risks and enabling accurate, real-time pricing for swaps and liquidations in a highly competitive, capital-efficient environment.
Solution: Accurate, secure prices—on-demand
DESK’s trading infrastructure integrates with the Pyth pull oracle, enabling precise, low-latency price feeds to drive its core trading logic. DESK can request new prices on demand, rather than waiting and depending on slow, fixed-interval updates. This architecture brings five key advantages:
Low Fees — Enables one of the most competitive fee structures in DeFi perpetuals.
Performance — Near real-time pricing supports accurate execution and technical analysis.
Security — High-resolution data helps prevent front- and back-running risks.
Asset Diversity — Broad asset coverage and rapid onboarding of crypto, forex, and commodities with consistent quality.
Adoption — Over $7B in volume traded and thousands of users onboarded on Arbitrum.
By combining real-time pricing with cross-margin support, DESK delivers a capital-efficient, secure trading experience purpose-built for high-performance DeFi markets.
Impact: New volumes achieved
Pyth is foundational to every function of the DESK protocol. Each user interaction relies on real-time price data from Pyth:
When users deposit collateral, it is marked using Pyth prices to determine allowable leverage and margin. Historical Pyth data also informs margin requirements.
For every trade execution, the trade price is sourced from Pyth.
Margin health is monitored continuously using Pyth marks, with initial and maintenance thresholds enforced in real time.
If a user’s margin breaches thresholds, liquidations are triggered using Pyth prices to prevent bad debt.
Looking ahead, DESK’s contributors are exploring leveraging liquidity data to dynamically adjust fees and manage open interest across 25+ supported markets—further scaling the DESK protocol with the Pyth price layer.
