K
Kathleen Martin
Guest
Suppose you could buy a share of Tesla Inc. and send it to a friend in Shanghai as easily as sending an email. Or imagine placing a bet on the inflation rate at the end of President Joe Biden’s term, which would pay off in bitcoin if you were right.
All that could become reality thanks to a project backed by some of the world’s biggest quantitative and high-speed trading firms.
Pyth, the brainchild of Chicago-based Jump Trading Group, is a blockchain-based technology service that seeks to provide free, real-time data for a variety of crypto projects. It is loosely overseen by the Switzerland-based Pyth Data Association, whose members include heavyweights of electronic trading such as Jump, Jane Street Capital LLC, Susquehanna International Group LLP and Virtu Financial Inc. So far, they aren’t running Pyth to make a profit.
Collectively, the firms behind Pyth trade hundreds of billions of dollars of assets daily. Earlier this year, they began streaming price data from some of their trades in stocks, currencies, commodities and cryptocurrencies into Pyth’s network.
Pyth’s data is publicly available and developers from around the world can simply write code to connect to it. They can use the data to create new applications in the fast-growing area known as decentralized finance. DeFi, for short, encompasses efforts to take traditional financial activities—like trading and lending—and automate them with software, with no central intermediary overseeing transactions.
For DeFi to succeed, it needs data—and that’s where services like Pyth come in. The creators of Pyth hope to unseat rival services to become the leading source of financial data for DeFi projects. The idea is to provide fast, accurate data that could enable innovative mashups of traditional and crypto markets.
Proponents say DeFi will cut out middlemen and benefit the world’s unbanked population—1.7 billion people who lack access to financial institutions, according to the World Bank—by providing banklike services to anyone with a mobile phone. For instance, people seeking loans could turn to DeFi lending platforms. Like banks, such platforms take money from depositors and lend it out to borrowers. But instead of bankers approving loans, they have “smart contracts,” or computer code that authorizes transactions.
Continue reading: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-worlds-biggest-traders-are-betting-on-blockchain-data-11638803023
All that could become reality thanks to a project backed by some of the world’s biggest quantitative and high-speed trading firms.
Pyth, the brainchild of Chicago-based Jump Trading Group, is a blockchain-based technology service that seeks to provide free, real-time data for a variety of crypto projects. It is loosely overseen by the Switzerland-based Pyth Data Association, whose members include heavyweights of electronic trading such as Jump, Jane Street Capital LLC, Susquehanna International Group LLP and Virtu Financial Inc. So far, they aren’t running Pyth to make a profit.
Collectively, the firms behind Pyth trade hundreds of billions of dollars of assets daily. Earlier this year, they began streaming price data from some of their trades in stocks, currencies, commodities and cryptocurrencies into Pyth’s network.
Pyth’s data is publicly available and developers from around the world can simply write code to connect to it. They can use the data to create new applications in the fast-growing area known as decentralized finance. DeFi, for short, encompasses efforts to take traditional financial activities—like trading and lending—and automate them with software, with no central intermediary overseeing transactions.
For DeFi to succeed, it needs data—and that’s where services like Pyth come in. The creators of Pyth hope to unseat rival services to become the leading source of financial data for DeFi projects. The idea is to provide fast, accurate data that could enable innovative mashups of traditional and crypto markets.
Proponents say DeFi will cut out middlemen and benefit the world’s unbanked population—1.7 billion people who lack access to financial institutions, according to the World Bank—by providing banklike services to anyone with a mobile phone. For instance, people seeking loans could turn to DeFi lending platforms. Like banks, such platforms take money from depositors and lend it out to borrowers. But instead of bankers approving loans, they have “smart contracts,” or computer code that authorizes transactions.
Continue reading: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-worlds-biggest-traders-are-betting-on-blockchain-data-11638803023
