A user guide for the noise.
Pythscan is a directory. It tells you what exists in the Pyth ecosystem. Pythipedia is the explainer that sits next to it: what each thing is, why it's there, and where to read the canonical source. Plain language, every claim cited, every concept linked back to its live directory entry.
Choose a directory
6Pythscan is split into focused directory surfaces. Start with the area you want to inspect.
Core
10- Core concept
What is Pyth?
Pyth Network is a market-data layer that publishes prices for crypto, equities, FX, and commodities to 100+ blockchains.
- Core concept
Price feeds
A price feed is a single tradable instrument (BTC/USD, AAPL, EUR/USD) with a live aggregated price, a confidence interval, and a status.
- Core concept
Pull oracle model
Pyth delivers prices on demand. A smart contract pulls the latest signed update into its own transaction instead of waiting for a scheduled push.
- Core concept
Publishers
The firms whose price quotes feed every Pyth update. Exchanges and trading firms, not scrapers — and every submission is signed.
- Core concept
Aggregation
How Pyth combines many publisher quotes into one number per feed. The short version: it approximates a confidence-weighted median, with outlier handling.
- Core concept
Confidence interval
The band Pyth attaches to every price. It tells you how tightly publishers agreed — the protocol's main reliability signal.
- Core concept
Freshness and stale prices
Every Pyth update has a publish time. Contracts must check it on every read or they'll silently use a stale price.
- Core concept
Pythnet
The appchain Pyth runs on. Publishers post here, aggregation runs here, and every signed update sent to other chains originates here.
- Core concept
Off-chain vs on-chain delivery
Pyth Core delivers prices to smart contracts via the pull model. Pyth Pro delivers to off-chain consumers via a direct binary feed. Same publisher set, different distribution.
- Core concept
Status flags
What Trading / Halted / Auction / Unknown actually mean on a Pyth feed, and what your contract should do about each.
Products
4- Product
Pyth Pro
Pyth Pro is the institutional tier: sub-millisecond price feeds delivered as a subscription, separate from the on-chain Pyth Core feed network.
- Product
Pyth Core
The on-chain feed network. Free to read (apart from a small update fee), pull-based, deployed to 100+ chains.
- Product
Entropy
Pyth's verifiable randomness product. Smart contracts request a random number on demand; a commit-reveal scheme keeps the provider honest.
- Product
Express Relay
An MEV-aware coordination layer for protocols. Apps auction their priority flow to searchers so MEV returns to the protocol rather than to the block proposer.
Network primitives
8- Network primitive
Oracle Integrity Staking (OIS)
OIS is Pyth's staking mechanism. Token holders stake PYTH to back individual publishers; if a publisher misbehaves, their backers lose stake.
- Network primitive
PYTH token
The governance and staking asset of the Pyth Network. Used to vote in the DAO and to back individual publishers through Oracle Integrity Staking.
- Network primitive
Pyth governance
How decisions get made in the Pyth Network. A DAO of PYTH holders, three specialized councils, and a forum where proposals get drafted and discussed.
- Network primitive
Pythian Council
The Pyth DAO council that owns oracle parameters and the publisher set. The most technical of the three councils.
- Network primitive
Price Feed Council
The Pyth DAO council that owns feed listing and curation. Where decisions to add or remove a feed get made.
- Network primitive
Community Council
The Pyth DAO council that runs community spend: grants, incentives, and ecosystem-growth programs.
- Network primitive
Pyth DAO Constitution
The document that defines how the Pyth DAO works. Council mandates, proposal types, voting rules — what each piece of governance can and cannot do.
- Network primitive
Proposal lifecycle
How a proposal becomes a decision in Pyth governance. Draft on the forum, temperature check, on-chain vote (if applicable), execution.
Tech
4- Tech
Hermes
The web service that distributes signed Pyth price updates. Sits between Pythnet (where prices are signed) and any chain that needs to read one.
- Tech
Supported chains
What it means for a chain to support Pyth: a verifier contract is deployed, the same feed IDs resolve there, and any contract can pull updates.
- Tech
SDKs
The libraries Pyth ships per language and chain. They handle update parsing, signature verification, freshness checks, and confidence-interval logic so consumer contracts don't have to reimplement them.
- Tech
Verifier contract
The on-chain piece deployed to every chain Pyth supports. It accepts signed updates from Hermes and exposes the price to consumer contracts.
Market data
1Glossary
Every Pyth-specific term you'll hit in the docs or on the forum, one line each. 21 entries.