Glossary
Plain-English definitions for the Pyth Network, oracle, DeFi, trading and portfolio terms used throughout PythFeeds. Bookmark any entry — every term has a stable URL like /glossary#confidence-interval.
Oracle
- Confidence interval (conf)
- A bound Pyth Network attaches to every price indicating how certain the oracle is. The real price is approximately price ± conf. Lending protocols use price − conf for collateral valuation and price + conf for debt valuation to stay safe against uncertainty.
- Publish time
- The UNIX timestamp marking when a Pyth price was last aggregated. PythFeeds surfaces a green/amber/red staleness pill — green under 2 seconds old, amber under 10, red beyond.See also: Confidence interval (conf)
- Pull oracle
- An oracle model where prices are published off-chain and pulled on-demand by smart contracts, paying a small update fee. Pyth Network uses this model (unlike Chainlink's push model). It is more efficient and supports sub-second updates.
- Push oracle
- An oracle that writes prices on-chain on a schedule, independent of consumer demand. Higher infrastructure cost, slower updates. Chainlink is the canonical example.See also: Pull oracle
- Hermes API
- The off-chain Pyth Network HTTP and SSE service (hermes.pyth.network) that distributes signed price updates. PythFeeds streams prices directly from Hermes.See also: Pull oracle
- Feed ID
- A unique 32-byte identifier for each Pyth price feed. For example, ETH/USD is 0xff61491a931112ddf1bd8147cd1b641375f79f5825126d665480874634fd0ace.
Trading
- Slippage
- The difference between the expected swap price and the actual fill. PythFeeds lets you set a tolerance (0.1% / 0.5% / 1% / custom) and flags quotes that deviate further than allowed from the Pyth oracle price.
- Limit order
- A conditional order to trade at a target price or better. PythFeeds monitors Pyth prices and fires a Jupiter swap when the condition is met.
- TWAP (time-weighted average price)
- An average price weighted by time, used to smooth out short-term noise. Smart contracts often use TWAPs to reduce oracle-manipulation risk.
Portfolio
- Sortino ratio
- Like Sharpe but only penalizing downside volatility. Useful when upside spikes shouldn't count as 'risk'.See also: Sharpe ratio
- Max drawdown
- The largest peak-to-trough decline in a portfolio's value. A −30% drawdown means at its worst the portfolio was 30% below a prior peak.
- Diversification score
- On the correlation matrix, 1 − mean(|r|) across all off-diagonal pairs. 100% means zero average correlation (perfect diversification); near 0% means everything moves together.
DeFi
- Depeg
- When a pegged asset (usually a stablecoin like USDC, USDT or DAI) trades at a meaningful distance from its peg. PythFeeds offers depeg alerts with a configurable threshold (e.g. 0.5%).
- Jupiter
- The leading Solana DEX aggregator. PythFeeds routes all swaps through Jupiter and validates the quoted output against Pyth oracle prices.
Statistics
- Log returns
- Returns computed as log(p_t / p_{t-1}) instead of raw percentage change. Log returns are additive over time and remove trend bias, making them the correct input for correlation and volatility analysis.
- Pearson correlation
- A measure of linear correlation between two series, ranging from −1 (perfect inverse) to +1 (perfect co-movement). Sensitive to outliers.
- Spearman correlation
- Pearson correlation applied to the ranks of the observations. Robust to outliers and captures monotonic (non-linear) relationships. Preferred when markets have fat-tail days.See also: Pearson correlation
- Beta (β)
- The OLS regression slope of an asset's returns on a benchmark's returns (usually BTC). β = 1.5 means the asset moves 1.5× as much as BTC. β < 0 indicates inverse movement.
- Volatility (σ)
- The standard deviation of returns, measuring how dispersed an asset's moves are. PythFeeds annualizes hourly volatility by √(24 · 365).See also: Log returns
More reading
- Correlation matrix — applied log-returns, Pearson, Spearman, β, σ
- Pyth price feeds — live catalog with confidence and staleness
- Portfolio — Sharpe, drawdown and BTC benchmark in action