The Pyth Network’s pull oracle has been successfully deployed on Solana, allowing developers on the Solana mainnet-beta to access Pyth’s oracle prices by requesting or pulling price updates from the Pythnet appchain. This new system will enable protocols on Solana to utilize the Pyth oracle similarly to applications on other blockchains.
The Pyth push oracle will remain available on Solana until June 30, 2024. However, the pull oracle offers significant improvements over the push model, especially in terms of reliability during network congestion and the number of available price feeds.
The initial version of the Pyth Network on Solana was a push oracle, which aggregated price inputs from data providers via Solana transactions and pushed these prices on-chain every 400ms. Despite its widespread adoption and accounting for 95% of Solana’s total value secured, the push oracle faced limitations during high congestion periods. Users often prioritized other transactions, leading to missed price updates and limited price feed numbers due to gas inefficiencies.
To address these issues, Pyth contributors developed the Pythnet Price Feeds, a pull oracle system. This new design only updates on-chain prices upon request, aggregating prices every slot on the Pythnet appchain—a Solana Virtual Machine instance. Solana users can now pull any high-frequency updates to the Solana environment.
“Oracles are the backbone of DeFi, and Pyth’s high-frequency oracle network has been pushing the space forward since 2021. The launch of their pull oracle on Solana gives developers greater control and optionality over how they consume oracle data, and paves the way for expansion into the growing world of new SVM networks,” said Austin Federa, Head of Strategy at Solana Foundation.
The Pyth pull oracle offers several advantages for Solana applications:
- Reliability: During congestion, pull oracles ensure price updates are included in valuable transactions, avoiding the competition for bandwidth seen with push oracles.
- High Frequency: Pull oracles provide higher frequency updates, especially beneficial during congestion.
- Price Feed Selection: The pull oracle can support over 500 price feeds, surpassing the push oracle’s capacity due to better gas efficiency.
- Historical Data: Developers can access historical prices via Pyth Benchmarks for accurate transaction settlements and to prevent frontrunning.
- Security: The Pythnet appchain aggregates data from more providers per feed (64) compared to the push oracle (32), ensuring more reliable and secure price outputs.
- Scalability for New SVM Environments: The pull oracle’s deployment on Solana paves the way for supporting new Solana Virtual Machine ecosystems.
Several users have already begun transitioning to the Pyth pull oracle, with the system receiving 200K pull updates daily. Prominent users include Kamino, Jupiter, Zeta Markets, Drift, Solend, Flash Trade, GooseFX, RainFi, PsyOptions, Mango Markets, Clone Protocol, Lifinity, and Bonfida.
“As Solana’s leading borrow-lend platform, it’s vital that Kamino users can rely on secure and robust oracle infrastructure. Oracles are not only price feeds; they are also risk features. By making full use of Pyth pull oracles, we can offer high performance and oracle robustness, especially during high congestion,” said Marky, founder of Kamino.
“Our team was excited to hear about Pyth’s move from a push to a pull oracle. It is imperative to us that the Solana Name Service holders and newcomers can make .sol trading decisions efficiently and confidently. The new pull oracle allows us to provide our users just that. The feeds are fast and reliable on all the supported tokens – we didn’t expect less,” added bonfida.sol.
“Pyth’s ability to deliver real-time asset price updates is central to our operations, ensuring that our traders consistently have access to precise, up-to-the-second pricing data. The migration to Pyth’s pull oracle takes these capabilities even further, with enhanced reliability, performance, and security for a significantly better user experience. We firmly believe that DEXs can and should compete with CEXs on all metrics, and with Pyth’s support, we are setting new standards in decentralized trading,” stated Tristan Frizza, Founder of Zeta Markets.
“As a user of Pyth since our inception, Lifinity is excited to integrate Pyth’s pull oracle to determine the prices at which our DEX trades at. This enables us to trade at up-to-date prices to ensure LP profitability and continue improving liquidity on Solana,” said Durden, Founder of Lifinity.