Powering the Future of On-Chain Data with Pyth Network

GM, GM. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell, the second installment of this week, in fact. So if you don't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week, allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they've built. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Pierre Tillement, who is the Head of Marketing of Pyth Network. So if you didn't know, Pyth Network is an oracle network capable of delivering real-time market data to financial dApps over spanning over a hundred blockchains. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Pierre, learn about Pyth Network, and how you can get started using their oracle network today. All right, let's get into it.

GM, GM. Welcome to the show, Pierre. I'm ecstatic to have you on today, man.

Glorious morning, Narb. I'm very happy to be on.

Amazing, amazing. Yes, I'm stoked that our audience will get to learn all about Pyth Network today. I've been taking a look at it myself, and it looks quite a powerful network. So I'm excited for our audience to kind of get a first-hand perspective from your end. Before we get into all those details, though, would you just like to give a brief introduction about yourself?

Yeah, of course. So my name is Pierre. If you haven't caught it, I'm French. And I guess lead marketing at Pyth and been at Pyth for about almost three years now. This is my first job into DeFi, crypto, and the crypto space. And now I'm, you know, I guess crypto-native. I'd not gone into finance or any of those, or marketing before that. And no, it's been a fun ride those past almost three years. And now, I mean, being at Pyth has been really an amazing learning experience. And we're, you know, attacking the market data industry, which is not the most known industry, but one of the most lucrative. So definitely an interesting challenge we have over at Pyth.

Yeah, I'll say. It's no easy task orchestrating a decentralized network of nodes. And I guess you mentioned it briefly, but you said you didn't start... this is your first gig in the crypto-blockchain space. Just curious, before that, were you in the technology sector or in something completely different?

Sort of. I guess my first job, I started a company in recruitment out of my... or I dropped out of my MBA to start this with a co-founder I met in a startup studio at the time in Belgium. And so I got into the tech as I don't have any technical skills. I do not know how to code. And at the time, I mean, as a startup without much money or funds, we were looking for ways to I guess launch a SaaS or launch, you know, a website, a platform to help students find internships. And I stumbled onto tools that I guess we still call no-code tools. So it wasn't vibe coding like you see today where you just input a prompt, but it's visual programming. So, you know, you can build websites today with 'oh, I want to put a title here, I want to put an image there.' So that's what I got into and so worked I guess on this startup for close to five years, raised funds and so on. Did pretty well, never caught fire in terms of growth. And COVID got there and hit us pretty hard with recruitment and internships and so on just completely paused. And so that's at the time we were running out of money and said, okay, that was a cool experience and went on to other things. And after that I just freelanced as I guess no-code developer, helped businesses build, you know, their company brains on Notion and stuff like that. And yeah, that's how I got into the technology part of thing. And then my family and younger brother got me into crypto.

Right on, right on. Was it kind of like buying your first set of sats, or maybe ETH or SOL or something that kind of kicked things off? Or was it like you went straight into like reading the white papers and all that?

Oh, so story is my younger brother, Marc, is the director at the Pyth Data Association. So he's my boss, I think technically. And so he started at Pyth the very... I mean, day one of the Pyth Network back in March 2021, I believe. And so early on I started hearing about crypto. I had never heard about crypto or except maybe heard a couple times on, you know, the news, heard about Bitcoin or whatsoever, but never really got into it myself. And so as we spent, you know, family vacations together and so on, he started telling... I mean, telling me a bit more. And at some point I was like, okay, get me on, what should I do, stuff like that. So he helped me create my first I guess Solana wallet. So created me on a... I downloaded Phantom, sent me a bit of SOL to play around.

And so that's I immediately got into I guess Solana DeFi very early on and NFTs. I, you know, I liked the community aspects of NFTs. And as my freelance work got a bit boring and difficult at some point, I was like, hey, I'm more and more entrenched in these communities. Maybe there's a job I can do. And you know, I was going through the I guess the Pyth Network ambassador program, so helping out in the Discord. Met one of my best I guess connections in the space, a fellow Solana Monkey Business holder called Maurice, who was super nice, you know, talking me into things and so on. And so by the, yeah I guess bit before summer 2023, I was like hey, maybe there's some projects out there that could use my, I don't know, my help. And when I shared that to I guess my new group of friends that I've made through crypto and Solana, the Pyth guys were like, hey, don't apply anywhere else. First, we want to I guess interview you for some stuff. So I really much started at Pyth as a bit of the intern helping out on structuring the, you know, the brain, the content factory and stuff like that that, you know, the social team was using to I guess plan out the marketing. And so that was my first step in there and it's what, two and a half plus years now? Never looked back, best job ever, and now doing some very interesting thing that is not just into DeFi but institutional aspect of things.

Wow, that's a wonderful story. And yeah, it's awesome your brother kind of roped you in into this very fascinating sector of crypto and DeFi and blockchain technology. Oracle networks... I don't know if a lot of people realize but a lot of the major applications, a lot of trading applications rely on price feeds from these types of networks to function. Even perps if I'm not mistaken. So I guess perhaps for people who might be new into the crypto scene, blockchain space, who might not be familiar with oracles, could you give them kind of a breakdown of what an oracle is and how it kind of plays into Pyth Network?

Absolutely. So the simplest definition of an oracle is to bridge data or be the bridge between the web2 IRL world and blockchains. Blockchains inherently are, you know, stand-alone ledgers that do not have access to any outside data than from their, you know, transactions and whatever happens now on-chain. For if you want the weather on your blockchain application, you likely need an oracle to go fetch that data to some data provider that will bring you the weather in Paris, in Los Angeles, whatsoever. For Pyth and I'd say financial oracles, it's about bringing financial data on-chain. And by financial data, Pyth is specialized in price data for I think we're about 10 asset classes that we have prices for. So the price of Apple, the price of Bitcoin, the price of, I mean, US rates, the price of foreign exchange pairs. You need to bring that on somewhere onto blockchains and that's what Pyth does as a financial oracle. Now oracle is a bit of a over-encompassing word that can mean everything... everything and anything. And we're Pyth, very, very laser-focused on financial data and pretty much building the network of data contributors that are as close as possible or the source of that price information and contributing to the network which we can, you know, calculate a price for your favorite assets and make it available to a bunch of applications on-chain or off-chain.

Well said, well explained. And I guess in terms of the key product offerings of Pyth Network, you mentioned targeting financials. What are, I guess, what's a broad overview of the different types of things somebody can do with Pyth Network as a platform?

The, I mean, the simplest way to put it is Pyth is a market data provider. For the ones that are more traditional finance connoisseurs, you could think of Pyth as Bloomberg or Refinitiv that provide data to a bunch of trading firms and traders that need access to real-time data. So at the core, Pyth provides market data through one subscription and all asset classes. So if you want prices for US stocks, crypto... I think we have some UK, the UK stock market, the Hong Kong stock market, and so on. Pyth provides that real-time, so all the way down to one millisecond update frequency, you get a new price. We're competitive with the best in terms of latency, so how late are the Pyth prices versus the industry standard, which is... I don't want to get into TradFi details but the SIP or the NBBO. And so that's very much where we're at.

And the interesting part is that we've been very focused on RWAs, equity assets early on, way too early because nobody wanted that on-chain. I guess regulations and being scared of, you know, the SEC coming after your perp DEX if you're listing Apple stocks to short or long 50x. But now I guess we're seeing that with all the different best on-chain apps and even off-chain like centralized exchanges offering now RWAs, equities trading on their platform.

Yeah, I was actually going to bring up the fact that you guys got started with RWAs so early. And now this year and maybe tail end of last year, we really saw the sector kind of explode and kind of go more towards enabling these types of things. From your perspective, being in Pyth, being in this space so long, what do you think changed between when you started at Pyth and up to now where like RWAs are kind of like now a hot topic? I think it's, I mean, a global movement of the first of all, the crypto and blockchain technology maturing and getting closer and closer to what TradFi does. And so you see all the big institutional players wanting to tokenize their assets and bring them on-chain or looking at blockchain rails to build applications or build their infrastructure. And now I guess with, I guess, the previous administration in the US was rather against crypto, saying 'oh, you know, it's not safe for users, you're going to lose your money.' Now we have I guess Trump being very pro-crypto and I guess launching his own meme coin to make a point. But they're very much more crypto-forward and blockchain-forward. And this is what's really, really interesting to see with those big, you know, government institutions and players that are much more into crypto and blockchain. One of the best examples for Pyth was to have the Department of Commerce working with us to provide GDP and economic data on-chain. So through Pyth and Chainlink is the second partner, they could send their GDP data to a bunch of blockchains. And so more and more they're testing, I'd say, use cases to okay, how do we... how can we leverage this blockchain rails? And now I think it's also a global worldwide demand from users, from me as a trader or as a, you know, just myself managing my finance. I want to be able to trade everything that, you know, is available out there at any time from the comfort of my, you know, my phone or my laptop. And I think the big institutions are seeing this and saying okay, let's make my assets available to as many people as possible.

Indeed, indeed. It's like now there's product market fit for this and yeah, we are seeing an explosion of just people kind of taking it for a spin. I mean, I wouldn't recommend anybody just get in there and starting with leverage. You should understand what leverage is, how it works before you get wrecked, so to speak. But it's really, it's really great to see this adoption kind of starting to take an uptick this last short while. And you mentioned one of your competitors. I'm just curious, in your words, what would you say sets Pyth Network apart from the competition? What do you guys... what's your secret sauce that makes you just a bit more better? Yeah, I think the secret sauce is not so secret anymore or I hope we do a good job marketing it. It is that Pyth, the Pyth model is built very differently from all other I guess oracle providers or even I guess more legacy players we see in the traditional space as Pyth gets the data from the source, pretty much, or what we say. That means that the network includes the top trading firms in the world, the Virtu, the Jump Trading, the market makers like Selini, the exchanges like CBOE and others, that are directly providing their data, their trade fields or what they do trading to the network, to Pyth. And Pyth aggregates those many different inputs from all those players and turns it into one price. And so that's super important because pretty much Pyth is the owner and creator of that price through first-party data that we call, pretty much. And that means that there's no need to repay for licenses and so on where other oracle providers oftentimes rely on redistributors or paying third-party data providers for access to data that is provided by someone else. So we're kind of skipping a hop on the supply chain of data where the actual price discovery is happening at the trading level, at the exchange level, it's going straight to Pyth instead of having these guys provide to another data distributor and that oracle getting to that data distributor to get access. So skips a hop and also economically more sound as Pyth doesn't have to pay for any extra licenses or doesn't make users pay for anything on top of the subscription that we offer.

Amazing, amazing. That's wonderful to hear. And shifting gears slightly, for our developer audience watching today, are there any SDKs, APIs, tools that people can get up and running with Pyth Network? Yep. So I'll direct you guys to the docs to look deeper, but as I have very little technical knowledge on this. But available on a hundred plus blockchains, so there's high chances that the blockchain you're building on has a Pyth smart contract on there. And then I think the docs are getting... got a fresh lift very recently, so it's rather easy to navigate, a couple of code snippets, SDKs to get you started. And if you need some help, don't hesitate to jump in the Discord or the Telegram chat and we'll set up direct groups with everyone that wants to build with Pyth to support on the tech integration side of things.

Excellent, excellent. And those resources will be in the description of the podcast. And in terms of the type of developer, type of builder that you guys are kind of looking to have integrate your oracle network, is it more of like an enterprise, institutional type of user you're looking for, or can weekend hackers, so to speak, get up and running? We aim to serve everyone. So we're doing a bit of a targeting of a new audience this year with our I guess Pyth Pro product that we call, the subscription Data-as-a-Service that you can subscribe to. Where, you know, I can't remember, I think it's 5k and 10k per month for the full asset library of Pyth down to the millisecond and all the good stuff. And on-chain, where we're available, it's rather easy to integrate. You pay, I think we're, you know, small fees for updating prices on-chain and so on, but rather easy. And what's been our focus, and because of the real-time data that Pyth was always focusing on to be, you know, able to support TradFi and, you know, traders on off-chain, the data is I think we have the fastest and the lowest latency data out there in terms of oracle providers. And so we're very, I guess, focused or what the sweet spot is for Pyth data is often perp DEXes. I think Pyth is the leader in terms of market share in the derivative space. I think it's about 60% or 65% and to date, I think the volume secured is close to 2.5 trillion dollars. So that's where that's our bread and butter. And the known apps that you may have heard of that are using Pyth price feeds are, you know, TradeXYZ through its HLP, Hyperliquid deployments, Lyra, the I guess second biggest DeFi perp DEX out there. And we've got I guess more traditional players that we've started to announce like centralized exchanges, the first one we've announced is BitMEX. And so wherever you're building pretty much, Pyth has a solution likely only through an API key that you get access to and you get access to the data or on-chain where you have access to Pythnet and can update prices on your home chain as you wish.

Excellent, excellent. And yeah, like I mentioned before, for people who are looking to get started with Pyth Network, the resources will be available to you in the description, so definitely you'll want to check those out. And I guess you guys already have quite a plethora of supported chains, the oracle network itself supporting perps. I guess what's, I guess, the North Star vision, roadmap so to speak, for Pyth Network for this year and maybe going into the next five years? I think the very high-level line we have is bringing the price of everything everywhere. I think that's the very aspirational goal and mission. Now it's... the main focus of the year is to disrupt through our new model the market data industry. And for some people that are not too into the weeds of this industry, one number we often throw at people and they're like 'oh wow, okay, this is not child's play' is that the global market data industry is worth about 50 billion to close to 60 billion dollars per year in 2025. And trading firms are spending and any institutional player insane amounts of money to get access to market data. For us I guess crypto degens, it sounds easy, we just go on CoinGecko or whatever and you feel like you have access to real-time data. It is not the case for traditional financial data, equity data. That is super expensive. NYSE, Nasdaq or those big exchanges, most of their business is through selling their data that they create. And so that's very much what we're laser-focused on this year with this I guess new product, Pyth Pro, which has been live for three months or so and position it a bit as the Spotify for market data. Where we have a bunch of musicians that are our network partners, the trading firms that provide data, the exchanges and so on that provide data to Pyth. And then you have the listeners, the guys like me that want to listen to the good artist that can pay for a subscription, get access to that data and input and use within their traditional workflows and wherever they may need that information. So bit of a new avenue for Pyth is to okay, how do we work with the most advanced players in the traditional finance world with our data. We're seeing quite some product market fit early on with a few user segments that are interesting. Centralized exchanges, market makers are a couple of the first ones that we've really identified as Pyth Pro is one product for them. And it's going to be about, you know, growing the catalog. I think we're close to 3,000 price points, price feeds today as part of Pyth Pro. Goal is 10,000 at the end of the year and more and more because the I guess the more legacy market data provider have up to millions of data points across a entirely different set of data that a bunch of businesses need.

That's awesome. Sounds like a lot of exciting things coming up for Pyth Network and I love that metaphor, the Spotify of market data. And just curious, have you guys seen a lot of LLM, AI, like trading bots or anything of the sort kind of plugging into the network and spin it up a POC or something? I think we have a few teammates that are playing around with a few early use cases of like building Telegram bots with Pyth data and so on. But that's definitely one aspect that we want to focus on even just purely on marketing where it's... I was saying this a couple weekends ago I think scrolling Twitter where most of the stuff that we're going to do as, you know, even builders now with the vibe coding that I don't see anything slowing this down. It feels like the improvement speed is just crazy. And at some point the, you know, it's Claude or GPT that's going to tell us 'hey, use this tool, use that tool.' And even, you know, I was just testing out some vibe coding on Claude. It was like 'hey, go use Supabase for your database for your app.' I was like I mean I've heard of the name but I wouldn't have been able to spot or I would have had to Google something. And so the even the referencing aspect of 'let's get Pyth referenced as early as possible' when someone asks for 'hey, I want to get access to market data.' It's probably going to name Bloomberg, Refinitiv and a couple others right now, but that's definitely one aspect of things that we're like we've got the infrastructure that can be very easily integrable through those LLMs and it's going to be about being present and making sure the brand awareness is there to make it happen. But I'm pretty sure, I mean you paste the docs or talk to Claude Code and you say 'hey, I want you to integrate my Pyth feeds in there,' I think he does the job already.

Yeah, 100%. And yeah, it's a very interesting time we're living in. These models are getting supercharged like every two, three months just going back and forth. And yeah, it's going to be interesting to see where they're at, I guess towards the end of the year, this year and beyond. But yeah, I guess Pierre as we're coming to time here, for our viewers and listeners today, what's the best way for them to keep tabs on all the things Pyth Network and yourself on socials and wherever else? I think the Pyth Twitter account, X account, is the best place to follow along for developers or I'd say crypto audience. I guess and we talk about everything on there. Hopefully we get into more traditional channels very soon and more seriously. And for myself, Real Pepito on Twitter, but that's very much secondary. I just mostly shitpost and talk about Pyth there so do as you wish on that front.

Indeed, indeed. And who doesn't shitpost a little bit here and there. And yeah, with that Pierre, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come chat with us. It was awesome learning all about Pyth and I'm sure our audience felt the same. I hope so too. If you have any questions don't hesitate to get in touch. And Narb, thank you all so much for the time. Was an absolute pleasure. Pleasure was all mine. And with that, I just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be. And we'll catch you back here for another great episode of DevNTell next week. Until then, have a good one folks. Cheers.