Pyth Network

Pyth Network is a first-party oracle and market data network: instead of scraping public APIs, it collects prices directly from the trading firms, exchanges and market makers that set them, aggregates them, and delivers them to smart contracts and to off-chain applications. As of October 2026 its homepage lists more than 138 data publishers, over 3,600 live price feeds across crypto, equities, FX, commodities and indices, and more than 720 data consumers.

Pyth started on Solana in 2021 and is still the default price oracle for much of Solana DeFi, especially perpetuals. In 2026 it changed shape. It now sells its data. Since 26 August 2026, applications need a Pyth API key and a paid plan to pull Pyth Core prices, and subscription revenue funds open-market buybacks of the PYTH token.

How the Pyth oracle works

Over 138 institutions publish their own prices to Pyth, among them Jane Street, Cboe, Virtu Financial, Jump Trading, Two Sigma Securities, Susquehanna, Binance, OKX, Revolut, Tradeweb and Nasdaq (publisher list). Each price feed combines many publishers' quotes into one aggregate price plus a confidence interval. The interval shows how far publishers disagree, so a protocol can pause or widen margins when it gets wide.

Pyth uses a pull model. Price updates are signed off-chain and served through the Hermes API. An application attaches the latest signed update to its own transaction, and the on-chain Pyth contract verifies it before use. The protocol therefore pays to put a price on-chain only when it needs one, not for a constant stream of updates. Pyth also runs sponsored feeds, which are pushed on-chain on a schedule for apps that want a price already there.

What changed in 2026: Pythnet retirement and the Pyth Core upgrade

Until 2026, prices were aggregated on Pythnet, a Solana-fork appchain run by Pyth's publishers, and relayed to other chains through Wormhole W$0.014-2.7% guardian signatures. In April 2026 Pyth announced that Pythnet is being retired. Lazer, the low-latency infrastructure behind Pyth Pro, became the base of the network.

The Pyth Core upgrade completed on Solana and Fogo on 26 August 2026 under DAO proposal OP-PIP-131. It made three changes:

• It switched the Solana receiver program's data source from the Pythnet emitter to the upgraded Pyth Core source.
• It replaced Wormhole guardian verification with a hardcoded 5-key Pyth signer set.
• It cut the per-update on-chain fee on Solana from 1 lamport to zero.

Contract addresses and the integration interface did not change, so existing integrations kept working (docs). What did change is access: every Hermes request, including historical Benchmarks data, now needs an API key.

Is Pyth free? Pyth Core pricing and API keys

Pyth Core is no longer free to use off-chain. The Core upgrade announcement lists monthly plans, and a free trial is included:

• Starter: $500 a month for crypto, NAV, crypto redemption rates and crypto indices.
• Crypto or Metals: $2,500 each.
• FX (G10 only): $2,500.
• FX, U.S. Equities or Futures: $5,000 each.
• FX and Metals: $6,500.
• All Asset Classes: $10,000.

Reading a price that is already on-chain stays permissionless. The cost lands on whoever fetches updates from Hermes, which in practice means the protocol or its keeper.

Pyth Pro, Pyth Indices and the Data Marketplace

Pyth Pro launched in September 2025. It is a subscription data service for exchanges, brokers, trading firms and banks, with update channels from real-time (1ms) to fixed 50ms or 200ms. It runs on Lazer and stayed online during the May 2026 Pythnet outage (see Risk below). Its coverage has grown fast in 2026: 3,501 feeds by July, including more than 1,900 equities (July report). Asian equities followed, with Korean names such as Samsung and SK Hynix and Hong Kong and Japanese stocks, and then Taiwan. Bond pricing from Fenics, OpenYield and Tradeweb was added in July, and corporate-actions data for all U.S. equities in September.

Pyth Indices are continuous 24/7 benchmarks for assets whose underlying markets close, such as oil, gold and equity baskets. Kraken, Coinbase and Kalshi use them for derivatives and custom baskets. Fifty were live by 21 September 2026. They include WTI and Brent crude, six constant-maturity energy futures indices and the first pre-IPO indices, for Anthropic and OpenAI.

The Data Marketplace distributes third-party data. On 22 September 2026 Pyth became an approved external distributor of Nasdaq Basic, Nasdaq's real-time top-of-book feed for U.S. equities. Clients still need Nasdaq's written approval (our coverage). Pyth Terminal is the self-serve front end, where users browse feeds, pick a plan and generate an API key.

Pyth Entropy: on-chain random numbers

Entropy is Pyth's verifiable random number generator for smart contracts, used for games, NFT mints and anything else that needs unpredictable outcomes. It runs on more than 20 EVM chains. It is a separate product from the price feeds. Trail of Bits audited the Entropy contracts and the Fortuna service in January 2024.

Pyth Network revenue and adoption

Pyth gave its feeds away for years and now reports subscription revenue each month. Total annual recurring revenue reached $10.4 million in August 2026, up from $7.49 million in July. Pyth Indices alone accounted for about $1.59 million of that (our report). Paying accounts across Pyth Pro and Indices numbered 122 in July.

On usage, Pyth says it secured 96.27% of the $752 billion in real-world-asset perpetual volume in August 2026, per a post on X. That is a self-reported share of the volume Pyth tracks, not an independent market census. On Solana its feeds sit under perps, lending and spot venues, including Drift Protocol DRIFT$0.016-2.8% and Jupiter JUP$0.291-3.6%.

Who Pyth Network is for

• Perps, options and lending protocols that need sub-second prices, a confidence signal and coverage beyond crypto (equities, FX, commodities, 24/7 indices). These are Pyth's core users. The constraint since August 2026 is cost: budget at least $500 a month for crypto-only data, or $10,000 for every asset class.
• Exchanges, brokers and fintechs that want licensed market data, including Nasdaq Basic, through one API rather than direct exchange contracts. That route runs through Pyth Pro and the Marketplace, not the on-chain oracle.
• PYTH holders who want governance votes. Holders can no longer expect staking rewards: Oracle Integrity Staking's 100M PYTH reward pool was due to run out by the end of April 2026, and Pyth proposed setting the reward rate to zero. Staking and slashing remain live.
• Small hobby projects that relied on free Hermes access are the group the paid model hurts most. A protocol that only reads prices someone else has pushed on-chain avoids the fee, but then depends on that other party's update schedule.

Is Pyth Network safe? Risks and audits

Audits. Pyth's security page lists audits by Zellic, OtterSec, CertiK, Trail of Bits and Nethermind from 2022 to 2026. The ones relevant to Solana are:

• CertiK, December 2022: the Solana receiver contracts.
• Trail of Bits, July 2023: the Pythnet oracle and validator.
• OtterSec, April 2024: the Solana pull-oracle contracts.
• Zellic, January 2025: the Pyth Lazer Solana contract.

No public audit on that list covers the August 2026 receiver upgrade or the new 5-key signer set. A bug bounty on Immunefi pays up to $250,000.

Who controls the programs. On Solana, the oracle programs are upgraded by the Pythian Council's Squads multisig, acting on DAO proposals (this is how the August 2026 upgrade was executed). This is a multisig, not a single key, but it can change the code that every integrating protocol relies on. Price verification now depends on a 5-key Pyth signer set rather than Wormhole's larger guardian network, which concentrates trust in Pyth's own operators.

Outages and bad prints. On 22 May 2026, Pythnet validators stopped producing blocks. Core and sponsored feeds were down for about four hours, and Hermes took longer to recover (CryptoTimes). Pyth Pro customers were unaffected. In September 2021, Pyth's BTC/USD aggregate briefly printed $5,402, triggering liquidations on Solana venues (CryptoSlate). The confidence interval on that print was four times the price, which is why integrators are told to check it.

Concentration. Pyth's share of Solana perps and RWA perps means a Pyth failure is a market-wide event. After Switchboard SWTCH$0.00009220+0.6% shut down in September 2026, the protocols that used it were pointed to Pyth and RedStone (our coverage), which concentrates oracle dependence further.

Pyth vs Chainlink and other oracle alternatives

Chainlink uses independent node operators that aggregate data from many sources. It offers push feeds, a pull product (Data Streams), and services beyond prices such as cross-chain messaging and automation. Pyth gets its prices straight from the firms that make markets. It leads on high-frequency trading data and non-crypto coverage, and has been strongest on Solana and in perps. Choose Chainlink if your protocol is EVM-first and wants a broad service suite. Choose Pyth for Solana trading products, or for equities, FX and commodity data with a confidence interval.

RedStone Finance is the other oracle Switchboard named as a migration target. It is the obvious second source for protocols that want to avoid depending on a single oracle. Switchboard itself is no longer an option on Solana.

PYTH token, governance and team

The PYTH token (SPL mint HZ1JovNiVvGrGNiiYvEozEVgZ58xaU3RKwX8eACQBCt3, see the PYTH token page) has a 10 billion maximum supply. It launched in November 2023 with 15% circulating (tokenomics). The allocation is:

• 52% ecosystem growth
• 22% publisher rewards
• 10% protocol development
• 10% private sales
• 6% community and launch

Locked tokens unlock 6, 18, 30 and 42 months after launch. The last tranche is due around May 2027.

PYTH is used for governance, not to pay for data. Stakers vote on Pyth Improvement Proposals covering fees, feed listings, publisher permissions and contract upgrades. Since December 2025 the PYTH Reserve has spent one-third of the DAO treasury each month buying PYTH on the open market. The treasury is funded by revenue from Pyth Pro, Pyth Core, Entropy, Express Relay and the Marketplace. Pyth said in April 2026 that the Reserve had bought about 12 million PYTH.

Douro Labs is the main core contributor, and Mike Cahill is its CEO. The Pyth Data Association publishes the whitepaper. Pyth is due to present its Q3 2026 business review and a "major announcement" at Pyth Connect on 8 October 2026.