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The new “Surge” Oracle Network on Switchboard is now available on MainNet today.
One of the network's largest priced oracles is much faster as Solana continues to consider competition with fast upstarts like fast lipids. Oracle is freely integrated and claimed by the Switchboard team as the fastest ever in Solana.
How fast? According to a press release from the team, Surge promises to provide price supply with a latency of 100ms.
That latency drops to an additional 8-25 ms if the protocol chooses to collocate using surge nodes on the backend, comparable to the oracle speed of CEXS.
Performance gain is achieved through major architectural changes under the hood.
Traditional “pull” oracles collect data, post on-chain and wait for network consensus before the app reads it. This is a pipeline that usually adds a delay of 2-10 seconds.
Surge replaces its model directly from the data source to the application with a Websocket stream, thereby bypassing the consensus step.
Prices are pushed out by the Oracle node only if the market price changes within the set range. This eliminates wasteful slot-by-slot voting and gas spending, which is the standard fare for traditional “on-demand” oracles.
This is Oracle targeting large Defi use cases, particularly “latency sensitive protocols/products such as Defi Derivatives and Oracle AMMS.”
Surge is built on Switchboard's Open Source Sale (Switch Forward Attestation Inference Layer) framework. This uses a trusted execution environment (TEE) hardware proof to ensure that each Oracle node is installed in the network and runs certified switchboard software code before providing data.
Today's snapshot of Solana's Oracle market shows a rather competitive market.
From a total value (TVS) perspective, Pyth leads the segment at $2.3 billion, followed by Edge ($20 billion) and Switchboard ($1.2 billion), Defillama data shows.
However, note that televisions measure the value of collateral that Oracle touches, not how often Oracle Feed is consumed.
