Blockchain To Redefine Global Markets In A Decade, Says Pyth Director

Blockchain technology will transform global financial markets within the next decade by dismantling their siloed structure and fostering a unified, accessible system, according to Marc Tillement, Director of Pyth Data Association.

In an interview with Benzinga, Tillement outlined how public blockchains—such as Ethereum ETH/USD and Solana SOL/USD already consolidate pricing, execution, and settlement into a single layer, a shift he sees accelerating to bridge fragmented markets like those in the U.S., China and Europe.

His vision, rooted in Pyth's work delivering real-time price feeds across 120+ blockchains, hinges on overcoming technical and trust barriers that currently limit blockchain's reach into traditional finance.

Tillement emphasized the disjointed nature of today's financial landscape as a key driver for blockchain's rise.

"The global financial market is actually not global at all," he said. "It's very siloed. So you have the U.S. market, you have the Chinese market, each European country, et cetera."

He pointed to traditional finance's reliance on separate layers—exchanges for pricing, traders for execution, and entities like the Depository Trust Company (DTC) for one-day U.S.-only settlement—as evidence of inefficiency.

In contrast, he highlighted how blockchains like Ethereum integrate these functions, enabling instant settlement and permissionless access worldwide. Pyth, built on a Solana fork, exemplifies this by providing high-fidelity price feeds for assets ranging from U.S. stocks to crypto tokens, available both on-chain and off-chain for free.

This consolidation, Tillement argued, positions blockchain to reshape markets over the next 5–10 years by creating a truly global system.

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Wall Street's cautious embrace—seen in JPMorgan's private blockchain and institutions' interest in yield-bearing stablecoins—suggests a gradual shift.

Tillement noted that banks might adopt shared, permissioned blockchains to enhance transparency, addressing public distrust.

"Even if they were to do all the operation on a privately owned but publicly verifiable layer, I think [it] would bring lots of confidence for users of banks," he said.

Pyth's model, with feeds accessible across continents and to U.S. retail analytics platforms, already bypasses the costly, gated data of exchanges like NYSE or CBOE, hinting at broader adoption ahead.

Technical challenges, however, loom large.

Solana's 400-millisecond block times pale against Wall Street's millisecond trades, a gap Tillement said, "This is still insanely slow compared to what Two Sigma, Susquehanna trade on on CBOE."

Efforts like Fogo, aiming for 10-20 millisecond block times with a "follow the sun" validator strategy—shifting nodes by region as markets open—signal progress.

Yet, he stressed that decentralization's latency, constrained by the speed of light across global nodes, remains a hurdle.

Data scale poses another issue: Solana's 5,000 transactions per second could generate unmanageable volumes over decades, with solutions like Arweave still unproven for such loads.

Pyth tackles reliability through 30-40 publishers per feed—exchanges and trading firms like CBOE and Two Sigma—and its Oracle Integrity Staking (OIS) system, which penalizes errors to ensure trust.

Tillement's outlook rests on these incremental advances, projecting a market where blockchain's speed and scope rival traditional systems, uniting finance across borders without the gatekeepers of today.

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