One of NYSE’s largest market-makers is joining a Solana-based data project

One of the largest trading firms making markets on the New York Stock Exchange announced last week that it is breaking into the decentralized finance space by joining a Solana-based market data project. 

GTS — best-known for facilitating large initial public offerings on NYSE — joined Pyth Network, a data project led by high-speed trading firm Jump Trading. Announced by Jump in April, Pyth is essentially a platform that aggregates Wall Street’s market data on the Solana blockchain. Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX is also involved with the project. 

Market data is the lifeblood for traders and has been a contentious issue on the Street. Historically trading firms have slammed large exchange venues—such as NYSE and Nasdaq—for unfairly increasing the cost of market data. In a sense, Pyth serves as a decentralized stream of market data that can be accessed through Solana. 

GTS plans to push its own market data onto Pyth through a node it will independently run, “furthering Pyth’s vision of having first-hand, real-time pricing available on high performance blockchains,” according to a press release. 

“Real-time market data content across asset classes will be a giant step forward for developing decentralized finance/“DeFi” applications,” Ari Rubenstein, co-founder and CEO of GTS, said in a statement. “For DeFi applications to mature, the sophisticated integration of asset pricing that GTS excels in is an imperative. Our participation in the Pyth Network lends a solution to a long-standing gap in real-time public blockchain distribution of financial data.”

The team behind Solana is said to be raising as much as $450 million in new funding.