The Pyth Network is a decentralised oracle system providing real-time, high-frequency market data across numerous financial assets such as cryptocurrencies, equities, and commodities, sourced from over 90 major market participants. It offers two primary products: Pyth Price Feeds, which update every 400 milliseconds, and Pyth Benchmarks for historical price queries. With permissionless integration, developers can access these data feeds without needing subscriptions. Governed by the Pyth DAO, members use PYTH tokens to participate in decisions regarding fees, data provider management, and software updates, aiming to enhance DeFi applications with precise and timely market data​.

Note

• The contract used to measure the activity was obtained from the price feed contract addresses documentation and used as a filter for the event address of the transactions.
• While the Aptos mainnet launched on October 18th, 2022, and the Pyth Network contracts facilitated some transactions in early 2023, the oracle commenced its primary operations in July 2023. Consequently, the daily charts in this analysis reflect transactions from July 1st 2023 onwards for better readability. However, the total values account for the entire history of the blockchain.

The Pyth Data Association sponsors the price updates for certain feeds on specific networks. Since January 20th, the majority of price feeds covered by Pyth Network on Aptos have been sponsored.

The charts below demonstrate the feeds currently sponsored by Pyth on the Aptos mainnet. The feeds are updated with a 1-second heartbeat or 0.5% price deviation. All the sponsored tokens are priced against U.S. dollars, so the denominator has been omitted for simplicity.

The contract addresses utilizing the Pyth Oracle were filtered using the Payload address of the transactions where the Pyth contract was employed. Analysis revealed that the Merkle Trade protocol has been single-handedly responsible for over 98% of the price feed updates. Transactions that had the Pyth contract address for both the payload address and the event address were also excluded from the analysis.

Pyth price updates are triggered both directly and indirectly by users, allowing for two methods of measuring user interaction with the Pyth contract. Indirect calls happen when a user interacts with a protocol, which then requests a price update. In this analysis, the number of users directly interacting with the Pyth contract was determined using the sender of the transaction (similar to the from address on EVMs) and is illustrated in the following charts. Notably, in the case of Merkle Tree transactions, the sender address of the transaction at execution differs from the user address that placed the order.

In over a year, Pyth has executed more than 270 million price updates on the Aptos network, with an average of 10 update calls per transaction. While the frequency of updates observed some fluctuations during the second half of 2023, they have been more consistent throughout 2024.

Requesting a price update from the Pyth oracle occurs through transactions and in batches. In each transaction, the oracle returns the price update for multiple feeds simultaneously to reduce costs. Over the course of a year, price requestors paid total transaction fees of nearly $500K, with an average cost of slightly less than 2 cents per update.

The following charts demonstrate the total fees paid by price update requestors to the Pyth oracle for each feed price update. Throughout its activity, nearly 2,000 unique addresses paid a small fee to the Pyth oracle.