Pythipedia · Reference

Glossary

Every Pyth-specific term you'll hit in the docs, on the forum, or while reading the Constitution. 21 entries.

C

Community Council: One of the three Pyth DAO councils. Mandate: community spend (grants, incentives, growth programs). 7 elected members plus 1 operations seat (6-of-8 multisig). At least one seat rotates every 12 months.
Confidence interval: A range Pyth attaches to every aggregate price representing how tightly publishers agreed. Smart contracts should refuse to use price reads where the interval exceeds their tolerance. This is the honest signal Pyth offers that earlier oracles don't.
Confidence-weighted aggregate: The math Pyth uses to produce a single aggregate price from multiple publisher submissions. Each publisher's quote is weighted by their declared confidence: a publisher claiming tighter certainty has more influence on the median, subject to outlier rules.

E

EXC-PIP: A PIP for changes outside any council's standing mandate (Constitutional amendments, treasury reallocations, major scope shifts). Requires a DAO-wide stake-weighted vote.

F

Feed ID: A 32-byte hexadecimal identifier addressing a specific Pyth price feed across every chain it's deployed to. Same ID for BTC/USD whether you're reading it on Ethereum, Solana, Sui, or Aptos.

H

Hermes: The web service that distributes signed Pyth price updates to relayers and applications. If a smart contract needs a fresh price, a relayer fetches the update from Hermes and submits it on-chain.

M

Market hours: When the underlying market for a feed's instrument is open. Crypto feeds trade 24/7. Equity, FX, and commodity feeds reflect their exchange's session — outside it, the feed surfaces as Halted or Auction.

O

OIS: Pyth's staking mechanism. Holders stake PYTH against specific publishers; if a publisher misbehaves, backers lose stake.
On-demand update: A price update fetched from Hermes and posted on-chain by the same transaction that needs to read the price. Pyth's pull model is built around on-demand updates rather than scheduled pushes.
OP-PIP: A PIP for routine operational changes (parameter tweaks, publisher onboarding, feed listings) within a council's existing mandate. Doesn't require a DAO-wide stake-weighted vote.

P

PIP: The formal vehicle for changes to Pyth governance, parameters, or treasury allocation. Different prefixes denote scope: OP-PIP for operational, EXC-PIP for exceptional, plain PIP for standard.
Price Feed Council: One of the three Pyth DAO councils. Mandate: feed listing and curation. 5 elected members, 4-of-5 multisig.
Price update transaction: A blockchain transaction that includes a Pyth update payload as one of its inputs. The transaction calls the verifier to validate the payload, then reads the now-fresh price. This is how on-demand updates land on-chain.
Publisher: An entity contributing first-party price data to Pyth. Publishers are exchanges, market makers, and trading firms: Binance, OKX, Jane Street, Virtu, Wintermute, and ~200 others.
Pull-based oracle: An oracle model where consumers fetch updates on demand instead of receiving scheduled pushes. Pyth is pull-based; Chainlink Data Feeds are push-based. Pull means no idle gas spend on every chain, at the cost of one extra transaction step.
Push-based oracle: An oracle model where a service writes price updates on-chain on a fixed schedule. Easier for consumers to read (the price is just always there), more expensive operationally (someone is paying gas for every update on every chain, whether read or not).
PYTH token: The governance token of the Pyth DAO. Stakers participate in council elections, vote on PIPs, and (separately) stake against publishers in Oracle Integrity Staking.
Pythian Council: One of the three Pyth DAO councils. Mandate: oracle parameters and the publisher set. 8 elected members, 6-of-8 multisig.
Pythnet: Pyth's purpose-built appchain. Publishers post prices here; the aggregation runs here; signed updates are pulled from here for delivery to every other chain.

S

Sponsored feed: A price feed whose costs are underwritten by a third party (typically the protocol that needs it) so it can be listed even if it wouldn't be commercially viable as a standalone feed. Data quality is identical to non-sponsored feeds.

W

Wormhole: The cross-chain messaging protocol Pyth uses to attest price updates from Pythnet to every consumer chain. Each update is signed by Wormhole's guardian set before any consumer chain accepts it.