Switchboard launches Surge, Solana’s fastest oracle yet

Key Points

1. Switchboard's 'Surge' offers sub-100ms latency for price feeds, an 8x performance improvement and roughly 1/100th the cost of conventional oracles.

2. Latency can drop to 8-25ms if protocols colocate with a Surge node, rivaling centralized exchange (CEX) oracle speeds.

3. The performance gain is achieved through architectural changes, including bypassing consensus steps for faster data delivery.

4. Surge is built on Switchboard's open-source SAIL framework, which uses trusted execution environments (TEEs).

5. In Solana's oracle market, Pyth leads in total value secured (TVS) with $2.3b, followed by Edge ($2b) and Switchboard ($1.2b).

6. Surge is aimed at high-volume, latency-sensitive DeFi use cases like derivatives and oracle AMMs.