Pyth Data Association Director Mike Cahill
Pyth
Mike Cahill is a director of the Pyth Data Association, the Swiss association behind the Pyth network, a decentralized oracle that brings financial data across asset classes on-chain–directly from major trading firms such as Jump, Susquehanna and Virtu. Oracles are data feeds that provide information such as asset prices to blockchain-based financial applications so that they know when to take actions such as executing a trade or liquidating a collateral position.
In this discussion, we cover the role that oracles play in the growth of multiple crypto verticals across DeFi, NFTs and Web3. Cahill also makes his case for why he believes that Pyth is more resilient and trustworthy than other top oracles in crypto today, such as Chainlink.
Forbes: Who are some of your biggest data providers and who are some of the biggest clients or consumers of Pyth data?
Cahill: From a trading firm category, it would be Jump, Jane Street, Susquehanna, DRW, Virtu, and Hudson River. Those are six that immediately come to mind. On the U.S. equities front, CBOE is by far the largest, but there’s MEMX and IEX, as well. In crypto, there’s a whole swath of them from FTX to KuCoin, Huobi and OKEx. On the FX front, we’ve got some like LMAX, which run crypto exchanges but also have got an FX exchange as well.
Forbes: What are the main use cases for oracles today?
Mike Cahill: Within crypto the primary use cases thus far have been in Web3, DeFi or NFTs. I would say more broadly that you don’t really need oracles for NFTs, so that really leaves DeFi. It’s a big use case. When you subdivide the category down even further, there are two classes where there’s a lot of integration, and those are lending protocols and trading. Trading has its own subdivisions, but I’ll start first with the lending protocols. Lending protocols require the mark to market value of the collateral at all times in order to assess the viability of the loan. If the…
