Pythia Integrates Chainlink Price Feeds and Keepers to Decentralize its Prediction Markets Resolution

On 28/06/2022, Pythia, a marketplace for expert identification in crypto, integrated Chainlink Price Feeds and Keepers. Pythia is available on Polygon Mainnet at mainnet.pythia.company and Kovan Testnet at testnet.pythia.company.

The integration gives us access to decentralized and unbiased price data and secure smart contract automation. Pythia’s users can now participate in prediction rounds with higher assurances that the data being supplied to the platform is accurate, decentralized, and tamper-proof. We’ve also saved considerable development time by using Chainlink Keepers to help automatically resolve prediction markets according to predefined deadlines.

Through a combination of these Chainlink trust-minimized services, we have been able to cut engineering hours by half and cut engineering costs by over 60%. Most importantly, the services helped us to automate core functions in our smart contracts, namely market creation and resolution, thus significantly improving the user experience.

Key Results

• Engineering hours saved: > 500h
• Reduction in engineering costs: > 60%

The Continued Growth of Pythia Through Chainlink Service Support

Pythia is a decentralized marketplace for expert predictions. Pythia brings together both people looking for quality investment advice with emerging crypto educators and influencers who seek to prove their expertise in a fair manner. Pythia’s prediction markets enable for a quick and reliable way to identify true industry experts thus satisfying the interests of both groups.

Securing Decentralized Access to Market Data With Chainlink Price Feeds

While initially building Pythia, we envisioned a prediction markets platform where users would predict the direction of on-chain asset prices. To this end, we required a secure and decentralized off-chain source of price data against which Pythia could compare users’ predictions. However, most existing solutions in the market either did not support our preferred selection of crypto assets or compromised decentralization for the sake of data availability.

Chainlink oracle networks have proven to be precisely the manipulation-resistant network of data providers that we have been looking for. Since we integrated Chainlink Price Feeds, we have been able to add support for 15 crypto assets.

Chainlink Price Feeds is the market-leading source for on-chain price data, featuring:

• High-Quality Data — Chainlink Price Feeds source data from numerous premium data aggregators, leading to price data that’s aggregated from hundreds of exchanges, weighted by volume, and cleaned from outliers and suspicious volumes. Chainlink’s data aggregation model generates more precise global market prices that are resistant to API downtime, flash crash outliers, and data manipulation attacks like flash loans.
• Secure Node Operators — Chainlink Price Feeds are secured by independent, Sybil-resistant oracle nodes run by leading blockchain DevOps teams, data providers, and traditional enterprises with a strong track record for reliability, even during high gas prices and extreme network congestion.
• Decentralized Network — Chainlink Price Feeds are decentralized at the data source, oracle node, and oracle network levels, generating strong protections against downtime and tampering by the data provider or the oracle network.
• Transparency — Chainlink provides a robust reputation framework and set of on-chain monitoring tools that allow users to independently verify the historical performance of node operators and oracle networks, as well as check the real-time prices being offered.

Helping to Automate Market Resolution With Chainlink Keepers

Following our integration of Chainlink Price Feeds, we still needed to figure out how to automatically compare the prices predicted by users with the actual market prices. We could not rely on individuals to manually compare the prices, since that would result in single points of failure and a high degree of centralization. This glaring issue motivated us to integrate Chainlink Keepers.

Chainlink Keepers is a decentralized service purpose-built to manage tasks on behalf of smart contracts. Chainlink Keepers serve as a decentralized, hyper-reliable, and economically incentivized automation bot that wakes up smart contracts when they need to perform critical on-chain functions, which usually take place at regular time intervals or based on external events.

In Pythia’s case, a Keeper node in the Chainlink Keeper Network reads the data from every block in the blockchain, checks whether any of the Pythia markets have reached their resolution dates, helps resolve the markets that have reached their dates, and checks the price predictions using Chainlink Price Feeds. Thus, Chainlink Keepers have helped us to completely remove the need for third-party intermediaries to manually determine market outcomes.

“We’re excited to integrate multiple Chainlink services to help bolster the security and enhance the functionality of our prediction platform. Chainlink’s battle-tested infrastructure will help ensure that prediction rounds are using tamper-proof data and resolve without any manual input required from our development team.” — Nikita Kravchenko, CEO and co-founder of Pythia.

About Pythia

Pythia is a decentralized marketplace for a fair, quick, and reliable expert validation in crypto. The platform aims to solve two core issues, currently plaguing the crypto community:

• Many people in the crypto community rely on “expert advice” for investment decisions. Yet, there exists no fair method to identify crypto experts.
• Knowledgeable individuals in crypto often find it hard to stand out in the crowded field of social media influencers, who feed retail with catchy slogans but little useful investment advice.

By leveraging prediction markets, Pythia offers a framework for fairly evaluating experts based on prediction markets. Correct predictions warrant not only monetary rewards but also non-transferable expert tokens, which quantify a user’s expertise.

Such tokenized expertise will be a boon for budding crypto experts representing a robust proof of expertise that could be displayed on social media (through future platform integrations) and used to grow following. It would also greatly benefit the wider crypto community enabling people to quickly find true experts in the rapidly expanding pool of crypto influencers.

Learn more about Pythia by visiting our website at pythia.mainnet and reading the documentation at docs.pythia.company. Follow Pythia on Twitter at @PythiaOfficial and join our Telegram group https://t.me/+861c-md9WcVkZmQy.

About Chainlink

Chainlink is the industry standard for building, accessing, and selling oracle services needed to power hybrid smart contracts on any blockchain. Chainlink oracle networks provide smart contracts with a way to reliably connect to any external API and leverage secure off-chain computations for enabling feature-rich applications. Chainlink currently secures tens of billions of dollars across DeFi, insurance, gaming, and other major industries, and offers global enterprises and leading data providers a universal gateway to all blockchains.

Learn more about Chainlink by visiting chain.link or reading the developer documentation at docs.chain.link. To discuss an integration, reach out to an expert.