Switchboard’s Surge: Solana’s New Oracle Breaks Speed Records—Wall Street Still Won’t Get It
Solana's ecosystem just got a turbocharged data feed. Switchboard launched Surge—an oracle so fast it makes legacy finance APIs look dial-up.
Why it matters: Real-time DeFi demands real-time data. Surge cuts latency to sub-second finality, bypassing the clunky middleware that plagues older chains. Traders can now frontrun… sorry, 'execute alpha' at blockchain speed.
The cynical take: Banks will spend $50M on a 'working group' to study this tech—right after their third 'blockchain pilot' fails.
Note, though, that TVS measures the value of collateral that an oracle touches, not how often an oracle feed is consumed.
Blockworks Research’s Ryan Connor has argued that a better gauge for oracle market share is total transaction value (TTV) — the notional volume actually priced by the feed — because a high-frequency perps DEX can ping an oracle thousands of times more often than a passive money market securing the same dollar amount can.
If Surge gains adoption with high latency use cases, Switchboard’s share of activity could expand faster than its share of TVS.
For now, low-latency data on Solana is becoming a public utility — and Switchboard is first out of the gate.
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