Pyth Network is a price oracle. It collects market prices from major exchanges and trading firms, aggregates them on a high-speed appchain called Pythnet, and makes the result available to smart contracts on more than a hundred other blockchains.
What distinguishes Pyth from earlier oracles is who provides the data and how it gets delivered. Prices come directly from first-party publishers (exchanges and market makers like Binance, OKX, Jane Street, Virtu, Wintermute) rather than from scrapers or aggregators. And delivery is pull-based: smart contracts request a price update on-demand, which means there's no scheduled push to maintain across every chain.
What it covers
Pyth runs more than 3,000 price feeds today. The catalog spans:
- Crypto: BTC, ETH, SOL, and hundreds of altcoins, perpetuals, and indices
- US and international equities: single names, sector ETFs, indices
- FX: every major and most cross pairs, plus emerging-market currencies
- Commodities: gold, silver, oil, platinum, agricultural futures
How it reaches your contract
When a chain wants the latest BTC/USD price, a relayer pulls a recent update from Hermes (Pyth's distribution service) and submits it on-chain in the same transaction that needs the price. The smart contract verifies the update against Pyth's signature scheme before using it. This is the "pull-based" model: no scheduled writes, no per-chain operational cost.
Who runs it
Pyth is governed by the Pyth DAO. Token holders elect three councils (Pythian, Price Feed, and Community), each with a specific Constitution-defined mandate. Routine changes go through the relevant council; large changes go to a stake-weighted vote.