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A | So the vision that we have for pith is that all the world's financial data should go through pith to be brought onto blockchains in a way similar to all the world's music going through Spotify. |
B | Hi everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, author of the Cryptopiens. I started covering crypto eight years ago and, as a senior editor at Forbes, was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full time. This is the August 29, 2023 episod... |
A | Thanks so much, Laura. Excited to be here. |
B | You're a longtime pith contributor, and today you have some news about new developments in that ecosystem. But why don't we just start with your background. Tell us about pith, what it is, and what problem it's been trying to solve. |
A | Yep, absolutely. So pith is a data oracle network and it is focused on bringing financial market data on chain in a trustworthy way with very low latency. My background is in traditional finance. I started at Morgan Stanley on the FX sales and trading desk out of college at a very interesting time where the markets for... |
B | Yeah. So let's give listeners more background on pith. You're trying to solve this oracle problem, which is a pretty sticky problem in crypto. Describe a little bit what it is, the problems that oracle providers face in the crypto ecosystem. |
A | Yeah. The oracle problem, by definition, is the shared state systems of blockchains don't have access to exogenous data and so someone needs to bring an on chain, and then there's a whole bunch of trade offs with who you're going to trust to bring an on chain. And we've lived through several cycles of them. And each ti... |
B | And so how does pith do that? |
A | So pith is inclusive. It's a first party data network, and it's inclusive of sources. So the nodes in the PIF network are the ones that are actually publishing the data or generating the data themselves. And so those consist of trading firms and exchanges. So there are 85 data providers in the fifth network. Today, we ... |
B | And the crypto markets are notoriously volatile, and there have even been flash crashes on exchanges as kind of professionalized as coinbase. How do you distinguish either volatility or flash crashes from something like price manipulation? |
A | So typically what will happen with an oracle attack even, and we'll just use that as an example, because that'll give you someone who's deliberately doing this, and it'll give us a framework for thinking about how it could happen without. The deliberate element to it is that you will find a small exchange that's being ... |
B | And you mentioned some data providers that definitely come more from the traditional financial world rather than crypto. And I wondered how those conversations went. What does it take to get that kind of institution to want to partner with a company that is essentially trying to bridge from the traditional financial wo... |
A | There's basically two types of parties that are interested in providing data on PIF. So the first one would be trading firms, and their motivation tends to be that they've never monetized their market data in the past. I mentioned that $6.5 billion of revenue is earned through market data. It's mostly earned by the lar... |
B | And then also some of them are already creating their own, like, for instance, reference rate. I don't know how that differs from this. Is that something where those products would be competitive with what, you know, like if they were, like, if. Let's say, because I know CME. So you have CBO on your network, but I know... |
A | I think they're quite different. So a single sourced reference point is going, especially one that's going to be mostly off chain, is going to be a certain type of a market. And what pith does is it creates the references that are the pith prices through the combination of all these different data sources. Now, there's... |
B | And so when you're vetting data providers to add to the network, what are the qualifications that you're looking for? |
A | We are looking for institutional grade companies that have a strong reputation in so much, where there is more at risk for them to lose in another business than there is for them to gain by trying to manipulate the pith price. And so they're very much household names, all these 85 data providers, and they're all public... |
B | So something that I find so impressive is that you've integrated 30 blockchains. As far as I understand, that's a technical feat. Just talk a little bit about what it is to try to provide for so many different blockchains, just on an integration. |
A | On a technical level, it is a lot of work, and my co founder and CTO, Jant, has lots of opinions on the best practices that he's learned by dealing with so many blockchains. Some of his insights that I think he would mention is that dealing with EVM, you get lots of benefits of ancillary tooling, so you get great walle... |
B | As you mentioned, Pif has grown very rapidly in recent months. So why is that? And how has it grown? |
A | Yeah, it's been really remarkable. It's exceeded my expectations for sure. So basically, pith has gone cross chain in January of this year. And on the pithnet side, we create a supply, or creates a supply of 320 symbols that are updating, call it two times a second. So it's, roughly speaking, 50 million aggregate price... |
B | And how is pith? What are the range of ways that pith is being used? |
A | Like most oracles or most protocols that require oracles, the two largest use cases are lending protocols as well as trading ones. But we also see things like structured products and other kind of collateral management protocols that use PIF. But generally speaking, those are sort of the broad two categories. It's kind... |
B | All right, so in a moment, we're going to talk about your news, but first, a quick word from the sponsors who make the show possible. Join over 80 million people using crypto.com. dot one of the easiest places to buy, trade, and spend over 250 cryptocurrencies. With the crypto.com Visa card, you can spend your crypto a... |
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B | Back to my conversation with Mike. So as we mentioned earlier in the show, you are now launching this entity, Duro Labs. Tell us how it will be working with the PIF network, and I believe there's a task coming up very soon which you might want to talk about this Perseus upgrade. |
A | Absolutely. We're very excited today to announce the launch of Doralabs. DoraLabs is a company that has 20 people, ranging from contributors that were at JMP previously, to alumni from Goldman Sachs or AWS, Chorusone and many others. And what we're looking to do is build out tooling and development for the network and ... |
B | And one other aspect that I think is coming is a permissionless state with token led governance. What will that look like? |
A | So right now, becoming a member or a node in the PIF network is managed by the pith data association, and that eventually will get turned over to governance holders. And so that and other key features. This is where pith as an application will have critical areas such as which symbols to add and which data providers do... |
B | It continues to decentralize in a decentralized state. If you're going to add new data providers, how does that work? Maybe there's a proposal to try to talk to this other centralized party, and then are certain people delegated to represent the network that way? I'm just wondering how a decentralized entity interfaces... |
A | Yeah, so it is an interesting point, given that the pith network has probably more contributors than most decentralized protocols today. It is going to be a little bit of a challenge. But I think this is something that will get proposed in governance and a framework that will allow basically general participation. Ther... |
B | Do you have a sense yet of how tokens will be distributed? |
A | No, we haven't had any announcements around that yet. |
B | Okay. Yeah, I'm sure probably the regulatory environment in the US is perhaps going to complicate that discussion. So tell us a little bit more about the plans for dura labs. Will you contribute exclusively to PIF, or do you think in the future you might extend services to other projects? |
A | It's totally possible that we could extend services to other projects, but for the moment we are laser focused on really developing PIF's network. We have a whole lot of embedded DNA with contributing to PIF from myself and co founders Karen and Jant. So that's where we think that we can add the most value. But who kno... |
B | And so the focus for duro Labs will be contributing tooling for just tell us, like you're servicing developers, is that it? |
A | Exactly. So it'll be continuing to advance the development of the network. And so that could include additional upgrades like the Perseus one. It could also be helping build out the network by working directly with data providers to go through the governance process. And so those sorts of things. |
B | The crypto markets are in a really interesting place right now. The volumes are down. We have market makers that have been withdrawing. It looks like finance is in a precarious state. I mean, there's just so many things that make it feel right now, like. Like the crypto market is just changing generally. And I was curi... |
A | You're absolutely right. It is such a weird time. We've now seen bitcoin make new lows at a time where I think people felt like we bottomed out for a bit. And I think that's sucked a lot of the air out of the room. So the interesting thing is we have not seen a general retreat in terms of the number of builders. So pit... |
B | And what vision do you have? For once things work in a sort of ideal state or in a fully mature state, what will that world look like? |
A | So the vision that we have for pith is that all the world's financial data should go through pith to be brought onto blockchains in a way similar to all the world's music going through Spotify. And what we hope to have happen is for the vision of defi being what I understood as kind of that paradigm shift when I first ... |
B | All right, this has been a fascinating discussion. Where can people learn more about you. |
A | And your work so you can learn more about the pith network? At Pith network, you can learn about Doralabs at Doralabs XYZ, and you can find me on Twitter at mdomkhill. |
B | Perfect. Well, it's been a pleasure having you on unchained. |
A | Thanks so much. |
B | Laura, thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Mike, the Piph Network and Duro Labs, check out the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Kevin Fuchs, Matt Pilchard, Zach Seward, Juan Aranovich, Sam Sriram, Megan Gapus, Ginny Hogan, Leandra Camino Shashank,... |
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