What Is PYTH Airdrop? Everything You Need to Know About Pyth Network

In an effort to displace Chainlink as the leading blockchain financial data source, Pyth Network has launched a speed-focused oracle service.

The recent excitement surrounding the token airdrop by Chainlink rival Pyth Network has brought to light a long-simmering competition between businesses to elevate the infrastructure of the emerging digital asset industry to the level required by conventional finance.

Among the most recent “TradFi” companies to incorporate “decentralised ledger” technology and other crypto ideas into their operations are JPMorgan and Visa.

Blockchains are able to access data, particularly price feeds, from cryptocurrency exchanges and other real-world sources because to Oracle services like Chainlink (LINK), which have been important in leading this transition from the old to the new.

But for decentralised and centralised finance to work together, crypto infrastructure needs to be up to the challenge. This means that traders in this new world of high-frequency price feeds and transcontinental connections need access to the same kind of minute-to-minute market data that they’re used to.

Here is where Pyth is useful. Pyth, similar to Chainlink, is a platform that provides data to blockchains; it is an oracle service. In contrast to Chainlink’s market-focused “real-time data” feeds, Pyth’s are lightning fast, which should make the service more suited to specific financial use cases.

The Solana blockchain was the pioneer

The project asserts on its website that it refreshes its data feeds at 300-400 millisecond intervals; it was originally developed for the speed-centric Solana (SOL) blockchain and eventually expanded into its own chain, Pythnet, using Solana’s technology. A chainlink refresh rate, on the other hand, can be anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.

The reason Chainlink is relatively slow is because it uses a network of node operators and “decentralised” consortiums of third-party data providers to get its data. The price feeds on Chainlink are updated either at predetermined intervals or dynamically in reaction to market volatility. There are new upgrades coming out shortly that focus on latency, so things might get faster.

In contrast, Pyth doesn’t rely on third parties but rather first-party financial organisations like as Binance and Jane Street for its data. Claiming to be meeting the needs of modern finance, this institution-driven solution provides speed gains several orders of magnitude faster than rival services, but it also reeks of “centralization”—a word that crypto’s disintermediating world finds repugnant.

Pyth also claims in its documentation that the Pythnet network compiles price data from many sources. Pyth asserts on its website that it uses a variety of cryptographic and game-theoretic procedures to guarantee the accuracy of its stated statistics.

As an example, Pyth’s “bridge” service, Wormhole, performs specific checks automatically prior to reporting statistics to blockchains. These validation services help keep Pyth’s data safe from manipulation, but if different sources give erroneous values, the system could still have measurement mistakes.

PYTH Airdrop

The long-awaited airdrop of Pyth’s PYTH token began this week. The new tokens can be “staked” by users who wish to have a say in the development of Pyth’s technology, as they will also serve as votes in the protocol’s governance mechanism.

Currently selling at $0.33, down from a high of $0.51, the token’s supply will be distributed, in part, among about 90,000 crypto wallets that have previously engaged with the protocol.