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Pyth Network Pallet for Polkadot
Douro Labs proposes building and deploying a Pyth pallet, allowing any Polkadot parachain to implement the Pyth oracle within its own runtime environment. Instead of natively integrating the Pyth oracle on individual parachains, a Pyth pallet provides economies of scale and coverage for all existing and future parachains, regardless of the virtual machine used. Deploying Pyth smart contracts on a single EVM-based parachain is straightforward, but managing multiple EVM-based parachains becomes cumbersome over time. Note that Pyth cannot currently be easily deployed on non-EVM-based parachains and deploying on individual non-EVM parachains would cost upwards of US$1mn each. By creating a Pyth pallet, the Pyth oracle becomes available on all Polkadot parachains and future management and upgrades are simplified. Therefore, a Pyth pallet for the entire Polkadot ecosystem creates a publicly available oracle network for the growing parachain ecosystem.
Pyth price feeds utilize a "pull" price update model, in which users are responsible for posting price updates on-chain as needed. There are several advantages to using Pyth's oracle pull model, including gas efficiency, high update frequency, low latency, scalable and reliable infrastructure, and a sustainable economic model. For more information on using Pyth price feeds, please refer to the documentation here.
The Pyth pallet will provide all parachains with all available products of the Pyth Network - Price Feeds (350+ and growing) and Benchmarks. The proposal asks for a grant of US$2.5mn for Douro Labs to build and deploy the Pyth pallet. The grant is requested in the following manner:
**-$1mn upfront grant to begin development. This is in line with our cost estimate of an individual non-evm parachin deployment.
-$1mn grant after development of the pallet is done, pre-audit
-$0.5mn after addressing any audit concerns and ensuring the pallet is ready for use
**
You can find all the details of the proposal here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VCMDLGYKbCrQvksgAqffvUpn6_pB1B0AaG9HD7EJg0A/edit?usp=sharing
Price feeds for DOT, KSM and ASTR are already live to use across 35+ chains which Pyth is deployed on.
About Douro Labs
Douro Labs is a software development company dedicated to advancing the Pyth Network. Douro Labs was formed by long-time Pyth Network contributors Mike Cahill, Jayant Krishnamurthy, and Ciaran Cronin in July 2023. The company employs close to 20 individuals who previously worked at firms such as Goldman Sachs, Jump Crypto, BNP Paribas, Amazon Web Services and Chorus One. The company is focused on contributing alongside other data providers and building developer-focused oracle tooling and core protocol infrastructure. Douro Labs is building oracle tooling, products, and Web3 infrastructure that will expand the Pyth Network's suite of decentralized data services and enhance access to real-time, once-exclusive market data for all blockchain participants.
Comments (4)
What?
@YungBeef Firstly, thank you for taking the time to go through the proposal :) The price per hour is a tricky metric, it was part of the draft I used to write up the proposal and we kept it.
The grant amount requested covers not just manhours from the engineers who would be pulled away from other projects, but also covers support, dev relations and community management for the 50+ parachains in the Polkadot ecosystem. In fact, with future parachain deployment the ecosystem would actually be much larger.
In our proposal we mentioned that deployment on individual non-EVM chains cost upwards of $1mn per chain. Individual EVM deployments are easier and our usual ask is around $250k per chain. However to achieve economies of scale we feel a pallet would be the right solution. This was highlighted in our discussion with Vara Network who are keen on having Pyth oracles. Keeping all of this in mind, and the scale of the development and ecosystem support, we feel the grant amount is fair.
The Chainlink pallet didn't cost the treasury USD 2,500,000. The USDC and USDT integration combined didn't cost that much either. Why should the treasury spend 2.5 million dollars to develop this pallet as opposed to just picking one of the alternatives? Though, that asking price is a good way to pick a market winner. Also, consider verifying your id. In it's currently form, it will be a NAY from us.
@saxemberg thank you for the comment and taking the time to go through the proposal.
I am not in a position to comment on other proposals in the past but we did note in our proposal that the Chainlink pallet is not maintained anymore and is unusable for developers.
There are indeed other oracles but I would like to focus on certain features of Pyth which has helped establish it as a leading multichain oracle:
-350+ price feeds across crypto assets, FX, Equities and Commodities
-All price feeds are available at sub-second frequencies
-permissionless pull model design currently being used by over 200 applications on 40 blockchains
The Pyth pallet would bring Pyth price feeds to all Polkadot parachains, current and future.