Solana Oracles and Data in 2026: Teams, Jobs and Money

Every trade, loan and prediction market on Solana leans on one quiet question: what is the price right now? The teams that answer it are oracles and data companies. They don't get the memecoin headlines, but in 2026 they are where some of the most interesting money, hiring and drama in the ecosystem sits.

In the last six weeks we've seen one oracle shut its doors, another post the kind of revenue growth most SaaS founders dream about, and the analytics crowd pivot hard towards institutions. If you want a career or an investment thesis in Solana that isn't tied to the next hype cycle, this corner deserves a close look.

The big shake-up: Switchboard winds down

Switchboard had been a Solana fixture since 2021, known for letting anyone build their own data feed without permission. On 18 to 19 September 2026 its core company, Switchboard Technology Labs, said it was winding down. All versions were deprecated straight away and support ended on 25 September. Users were told to move to other providers, with Pyth and RedStone named as options.

The reasons it gave are worth reading slowly, because they tell you where this market is heading:

• AI has made it cheaper to build your own oracle, which cut pricing power.
• Protocols are licensing data directly from the source rather than through an oracle network.
• Fast, high-quality infrastructure is expensive to run, and recent exploits added pressure. In late August it had already halted its feeds on Aptos, Sui, IOTA and Movement after a suspected key compromise. Solana feeds were not reported as affected.

Big Solana names had about six days to migrate, including Kamino, Marginfi, Jito and Drift. The good news is that it mostly worked. The tracker OracleCanary shows every listed lending market on Kamino, Marginfi and Jupiter Lend has moved off Switchboard. Only 70 small, permissionless reserves still depend on it, with about $79 supplied in total.

My take: this is a healthy, if painful, sign of a maturing market. Weak business models get found out, and the ecosystem coped without a crisis. For job seekers, it's also a reminder to ask any data company one simple question in the interview: who pays you, and why will they keep paying?

Pyth: the oracle that turned into a data business

On the other side of that question sits Pyth Network. Pyth ended Q3 2026 with $11.49M in active annual recurring revenue, up 86.5% on the quarter, according to its own Q3 update. The numbers underneath are what make it interesting:

• Pyth Pro, its paid institutional data product, was at $9.68M of that ARR.
• Pyth Indices added $1.81M across 16 live clients.
• It now has 276 paying accounts, and its self-serve Pyth Terminal brought in $500K of new ARR in September alone.
• Terminal monthly users hit 129,265 in September, and the catalogue passed 3,811 symbols.

The growth is coming from markets that barely existed two years ago. Pyth says more than 94% of tracked real-world asset perpetual volume, meaning perps on stocks, gold, oil and indices, ran on its data last quarter, over $2 trillion in total. Kalshi named Pyth as the sole source for its gold and silver perps in regulatory filings, and Coinbase named it in an SEC filing for single-stock perps. Pyth also got approval to distribute Nasdaq Basic through its Data Marketplace.

What it means for PYTH holders

Under proposal OP-PIP-136, the Pyth DAO now puts 100% of the funds it receives from Pyth products into buying PYTH on the open market. The DAO gets a 60% share of revenue from the products it owns, and its reserve held about 42 million PYTH after the first buys under the new rule on 30 September.

That's a cleaner link between usage and the token than most of crypto offers. It's still early. $11.5M ARR is a real business, not a giant one yet, so treat it as a growth story to track monthly rather than a sure thing.

The analytics teams are chasing institutions too

The same shift is happening in on-chain analytics. Retail dashboards are table stakes now. The money is in data that funds, banks and exchanges can trust.

• Birdeye launched Birdeye Peak on 21 October, a terminal for professional allocators. It already supplies Solana market data to wallets like Backpack and Solflare and indexes over 400 DEXs across 20 chains.
• Dune says it serves 1,000+ organisations including Visa, Bloomberg and the IMF with a team of about 50 people, and is building a new market data platform.
• Nansen labels and tracks over 500 million addresses for traders and funds.

Explorers and portfolio tools like Solscan and Step Finance round out the stack. You can browse more in the Data & Analytics category and the Infrastructure category.

Who is hiring right now

Here are real roles I found open or recently posted. Always check the live listing before you apply.

• Douro Labs (core team behind Pyth): a Market Analyst for prediction markets and perps, remote in the US or Europe, posted 27 September. There's also a Data Systems Operations Lead role running Pyth Pro's feeds, remote-first in the Americas, and the team mentions building an Amsterdam hub.
• Dune: four open roles, including Head of Product and Staff Software Engineers for Data Foundation, Data Products and Market Data. All remote across East Coast US and Europe.
• Nansen: a Senior Data Engineer, remote in EMEA, with a stated path to engineering manager in 12 to 18 months.

Notice the pattern. Nearly every listing asks for people who understand both markets and data systems, and several say outright that they expect you to work with AI tools. Nansen's post names tools like Cursor and Claude Code. If you can write SQL, reason about latency and explain a funding rate, you're the profile these teams want.

Practical advice for job seekers and investors

If you want to work here:

1. Build something public with real data. A Dune dashboard on Solana perps or prediction markets is a better CV than a certificate.
2. Learn the boring parts: data quality, incident response and uptime. Switchboard's exit shows reliability is the whole product.
3. Get fluent in RWA perps and prediction markets. That's where the new oracle revenue is coming from.

If you're investing:

1. Follow revenue, not partnerships. Pyth publishes monthly numbers, which makes it easy to track.
2. Ask who owns the data. Switchboard named direct licensing as a threat, so favour teams with first-party sources or proprietary indexes.
3. Watch concentration risk. When most of Solana DeFi runs on one or two oracles, a single outage matters more.

I'm genuinely optimistic about this space. Prices for stocks, gold and even pre-IPO companies are moving on-chain, and AI agents need clean, live data to act. The teams that supply it are becoming real financial infrastructure, and they're hiring for it.

What to do next

Explore the oracle, data and analytics teams building on Solana in the Solana Teams directory, and check their careers pages while the hiring is open. Building a data, oracle or analytics product yourself? List your team on Solana Teams so job seekers and investors can find you.