Solana strikes again: Virtu Financial follows LMAX Group into Pyth Network
Solana’s token, SOL, continues to rebound from last week’s general plunge in the cryptocurrency markets. The asset is still down by nearly 20% from last week.
Virtu Financial has joined the Pyth Network, a decentralized financial market data distribution platform backed by Jump Trading.
The provider of execution services and data, analytics, and connectivity products will contribute its financial market data across equities, FX, futures, and cryptocurrencies for consumption by smart contracts using the Solana blockchain and other major blockchains.
Douglas Cifu, CEO of Virtu Financial commented: “We are excited to join this promising network that we hope will transform the way pricing market data is used on the blockchain. With growing support from the trading community, we believe the Pyth Network will become an integral piece of infrastructure in the quickly evolving DeFi ecosystem, enabling new market participants and more efficient markets.”
The Pyth Network, built on the Solana blockchain, enables data owners to contribute their data on-chain and in a sub-second timescale.
The network also plans to publish high fidelity, streaming, and readily accessible market data through all other major blockchains at their fastest block times.
Virtu Financial joins Pyth Network following LMAX Group earlier this week, who pledged its FX and cryptocurrency data to the network. LMAX Group was the first major institutional exchange joining the Pyth Network.
Pyth is built on the Solana blockchain, a challenger to Ethereum’s dominance in the DeFi space, which is well-suited for timely and cost and energy efficient receipt and distribution of fast-moving data.
This can be counted as another win for Solana Labs, which has recently raised $314 million from leading players in the space in an attempt to challenge Ethereum.
Investors and a growing community of developers believe that Solana could provide that alternative due to its lower fees and high transaction speed.
The blockchain can process up to 50,000 transactions per second at this time and this is expected to improve as upgrades are made and as the ecosystem grows.
The fact that some major investors like Alameda Research (owners of the FTX exchange) are betting on Solana could ensure that it emerges as a serious contender for the development and the innovations that are currently happening on Ethereum.
There are other alternatives to both these blockchains like the Flow blockchain but the market buzz hasn’t yet caught on for these blockchains as much as it has for Solana.
Already many DeFi teams have shown interest to build on Solana and the company has also been upgrading its blockchain to cater to this space.
DeFi is expected to be the next frontier for development and innovation and there has been a lot of competition in this space to gain investor attention.
It would be interesting to see how Solana develops in the coming years and whether it would continue to challenge Ethereum or whether it would lose steam in the long run.
Solana’s token, SOL, continues to rebound from last week’s general plunge in the cryptocurrency markets. The asset is still down by nearly 20% from last week.
