How Pyth Network empowers Thales and Speed Markets to reach new levels of excitement
Pyth’s data feeds have been instrumental in helping develop Speed Markets, one of the most exciting products built on Thales Protocol.
With Phase 2 of Pyth’s Retrospective Airdrop being delivered to dApps starting today, Speed Markets can continue going down the path of improving based on community feedback and expanding to new frontiers.
Let’s dive into how Pyth Network and Thales combined for an awesome product and what the future of Speed Markets looks like. But first, a bit of context…
What’s what
Thales is an Ethereum protocol that allows the creation of on-chain, permissionless, and non-custodial markets. Thales serves as a liquidity layer and market-making solution for exclusive-outcome markets, such as whether Ethereum will be above or below a certain price on a given date. It has many use cases in derivative trading platforms, and binary options contracts serve as its core mechanism.
One of the newest and most exciting use cases of Thales Protocol is Speed Markets, a product that allows traders to participate in binary crypto markets that last anywhere between 10 minutes and 24 hours. You simply select an asset, whether its price goes UP or DOWN, and a time frame.
These markets are extremely fast-paced and as such need to be based on a snapshot of real-time asset prices when a trade is submitted.
This is where Pyth Benchmark data feeds come in. Thanks to on-demand oracles that provide historically queryable prices, Speed Markets can validate trades in near real-time.
Every second, Pyth Benchmark price feeds are updated using source data from reputable third-party data publishers that can be easily verified from the Pythnet blockchain.
On November 1, 2023, Pyth Network announced the Pyth Network Retrospective Airdrop. It was one of the largest cross-chain initiatives in Web3, encompassing 75,000 wallets, 27 blockchains, and 200+ dApps.
This airdrop also included Speed Markets users and the dApp itself. Any wallet that created positions on Speed Markets before September 1 on Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Base is eligible for the airdrop until February 18, 2024. Phase 2 of the airdrop will now be used to further the development of Speed Markets.
Thales intends to use the $PYTH allocation to develop Speed Markets by incentivizing users through trading competitions, rebates, and rewards. On top of ongoing product improvements and deploying to new chains, the allocation would also be used to participate in Pyth governance decisions.
Why Pyth Benchmarks are a great fit for Speed Markets
There are a few reasons why Pyth data was the perfect choice for Thales and Speed Markets:
- The on-demand oracles with near real-time data offer much-needed speed when creating asset price snapshots, with updates happening in mere seconds
- The ease of integration of Pyth Benchmarks
- The data provided through Pyth Benchmarks is highly reliable, provided by reputable first-party publishers, and verifiable on 13+ blockchains
All of this, combined with the enthusiasm of the Thales community, has resulted in a hugely successful journey for Speed Markets so far. Since its inception in August 2023, Speed Markets has seen an amazing $2,2 million in trading volume, 27,000+ markets created, and close to 600 users.
The product’s quick growth has been followed by a number of UX improvements requested by the community, such as reducing the shortest market time frame from 1 hour to just 10 minutes.
In October, Speed Markets introduced multicollateral onramp/offramp for Optimism, Arbitrum, and Base, supporting buy-ins/payouts in any of the following: sUSD, USDC(.e), DAI, USDT, ARB, OP, ETH, WETH.
In addition, Speed Markets recently completed the addition of chained markets, where traders can chain their predictions in 2–6 rounds. Winnings are automatically compounded into the next round, adding a new adrenaline-pumping dimension for users.
You can check out this Dune dashboard for more key Speed Markets metrics.
How Speed Markets works under the hood
Speed Markets and Chained Speed Markets leverage Pyth’s real-time and historical BTC and ETH price feeds. Relevant prices are served via off-chain APIs to contracts to verify on-chain:
- That the submitted current price of an asset at the time of a new market creation is the actual real-time price and no older than the maximum time buffer*.
- That the historical price at a given timestamp is accurate with no more than a variable defined time buffer*, and use that price to resolve the market and check whether a user is eligible to claim the winnings.
*a buffer is needed to allow users time to sign the transaction and for the blockchain to mine a transaction. The delay may be use-case- and blockchain-specific.
Relevant contracts:
- https://github.com/thales-markets/contracts/blob/main/contracts/SpeedMarkets/SpeedMarketsAMM.sol
- https://github.com/thales-markets/contracts/blob/main/contracts/SpeedMarkets/ChainedSpeedMarketsAMM.sol
The above contracts use Pyth’s solidity SDK and the method updatePriceFeeds for the said verification. The contracts allow for a single or batched market resolution.
What users are saying about Speed Markets
User feedback for Speed Markets has been overwhelmingly positive and continues to be the basis for future product improvements.
Here are some of the most interesting comments Speed Markets has received, including one from a trading competition that ended in October.
Keep an eye out for new chains, more price feeds, and new iterations…
We plan to continue leveraging Pyth’s availability on reliability on a multitude of new chains, as well as use more potential price feeds other than BTC and ETH to bring Speed Markets to new users and further iterate on product improvements.
If you want to experience the thrill of much shorter binary options on Speed Markets and see how Pyth Benchmarks dynamically update the data in the product, you can check out this link.
You can also head on over to the Thales website and Discord and check out some of the other products on offer, as well as participate in the discussion around their future!
Website: https://thalesmarket.io/
Docs: https://docs.thalesmarket.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thales_io
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/thales
Of course, feel free to check out the links to the official Pyth Network channels:
Website: https://pyth.network
Price Feeds: https://pyth.network/price-feeds
Docs: https://docs.pyth.network
Twitter: https://x.com/PythNetwork
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/PythNetwork
