The promising price feed oracle project Pyth Network is pushing the pedal to the metal, accelerating its growth to emerge as one of the main challengers in an industry that was once dominated by Chainlink.
Price oracles play a key role in crypto industries such as DeFi, providing isolated blockchain networks with a secure and reliable source of accurate, off-chain data such as the prices of crypto assets, stocks and shares, sport results, and more.
They’re essential for advanced dApps because blockchain-based smart contracts cannot directly access off-chain information. They need a bridge to the real world, and oracles provide that. dApps need oracles for many different reasons, for instance, a lending protocol needs them to determine asset prices across chains so it can calculate collateralization requirements, while an algorithmic stablecoin needs to peg its price to an external asset such as fiat or gold.
While Chainlink leveraged its first mover advantage to become the biggest price oracle of all, its dominance is increasingly threatened by smaller players, and few show more promise than Pyth, which has built what it says is a superior architecture based on a novel “pull” mechanism.
Chainlink’s price oracles are based on a “push” algorithm that updates its price feeds at regular intervals, usually every few minutes but in some cases, only once an hour or so. That means that the prices it delivers may not always be entirely accurate. Pyth, on the other hand, enables dApps to “pull” asset prices whenever they require them. They can simply send a request and have the latest prices delivered in milliseconds, at low costs, ensuring much greater accuracy.
The benefits of Pyth’s architecture are getting a lot of attention these days, and the project has come on in leaps and bounds since the turn of the year, growing rapidly in terms of both total value locked and blockchain adoption. Back in March, Pyth announced it had hit a milestone of over $7 billion in TVL while expanding its total staked value to more than $1.3 billion.
Throughout May, Pyth continued to set the pace of growth for the rest of the market to follow, hitting a number of impressive new milestones. In its latest key performance indicator report, Pyth revealed that its network facilitated over $100 billion in monthly trading volume, bringing its total volume traded to date to more than half a trillion dollars since it was founded.
Pyth also boosted its total value secured or TVS to more than $8 billion. The TVS metric is often used as a gauge of market share, and it reveals that Pyth has become the dominant oracle price protocol on a number of innovative blockchains, including projects such as Aptos, Sui, Solana, and Merlin Chain where it accounts for more than 90% of all oracle TVS, and Linea, where it accounts for 80% TVS. Transaction volume is another key metric, and Pyth also dominates in this category on Aptos, Sui, Solana, Optimism, Blast and other blockchains.
Pyth’s growing number of dApp integrations is another interesting growth metric, which rose from 345 at the end of April, to 367 on May 31. Meanwhile, it also expanded its number of price/asset feeds to 545, having counted just 524 one month earlier. Four new data providers were added too, including Synfutures and Alphanonce, bringing the total to 105.
All told, Pyth ended the month on a high, expanding its services to an impressive 64 blockchains in total, up from just 58 in the previous month.
Unusually for a mature crypto project like Pyth, its rate of growth does not appear to be slowing down the larger it gets. In fact, the graphics supplied in its KPI charts for May show that, if anything, its acceleration is gaining steam, and that could be taken as a sign that Chainlink’s position as the industry’s number one price oracle could be under threat.
