Pyth Oracle Integration with Cardano: Cardano has approved and launched the integration with the Pyth Network under its Critical Integrations framework. Pyth is a widely used low-latency institutional-grade price source in the industry, and deployment work has begun, aiming for completion in early 2026.
For many years, Cardano has lacked a mainstream oracle, and the inflow of data from the off-chain world has always been a shortcoming.
The absence of a widely adopted price source has made it difficult to scale scenarios such as lending, derivatives, and perpetual contracts, and institutions are hesitant to implement important strategies on this chain. Moreover, developers prefer to go to EVM chains to minimize hassle.
Pyth's price data comes directly from exchanges, market makers, and institutions themselves. It covers not just cryptocurrencies but also stocks, forex, commodities, and ETFs. It is now used by a large number of high-frequency, low-latency applications, such as perpetual contracts and prediction markets.
Pyth's features include high frequency and low latency, suitable for trading and derivatives scenarios that require extremely high real-time data.
The industry indeed discusses it alongside Chainlink, with each having its advantages in different scenarios.
Chainlink's advantages: the most mature ecosystem, wide coverage, and years of security validation.
Chainlink's issues: high costs, relatively high latency, not friendly for high-frequency finance.
Pyth's advantages: data sources are more institutional and exchange-oriented, extremely low latency, more friendly for derivatives and high-frequency applications.
Technically, there is another frequently discussed point called Push and Pull, two ways of price feeding.
The Push model is where the oracle periodically or based on a threshold pushes prices to the chain, suitable for lending and other scenarios that do not require each transaction to use the latest price compulsorily.
The Pull model allows applications to actively pull and write the latest prices when needed, suitable for latency-sensitive perpetual contracts and high-frequency strategies.
The benefit of Pyth is that it supports both access methods, providing both already pushed on-chain price feeds and allowing applications to pull high-frequency updates on demand through offline services, giving developers more room to balance latency, cost, and security.
