---
title: "Oracle Integrity Staking (OIS)"
description: >-
  Oracle Integrity Staking enhances Pyth Price Feeds with decentralized staking 
  rewards and slashing mechanisms to improve data source accountability.
full: false
index: true
---

This document outlines the design principles and implementation details of the [Oracle Integrity Staking (OIS)](https://staking.pyth.network/) protocol.

## Design Principles

OIS's economic design focuses on awarding and penalizing stakers over the primary dimension of data accuracy.

Stakers are incentivized to help maintain data quality by receiving rewards from an open-ended pool. However, they also face the risk of having their stake slashed as a penalty for failing to maintain data accuracy.

The core design principles behind OIS include the following:

- Oracle Integrity Staking secures all current and future price feeds produced by the Pyth Network.
- Data Publishers are individually responsible for data accuracy.
- Rewards and penalties are proportionate to the stake assigned to each publisher. Delegators share the risks and rewards of the publisher(s) to whom they assign their stake.
- A higher number of publishers for each price feed contributes positively to the security of such feed.
- Staking for **OIS** is complementary to staking for **governance**, and eligible $PYTH tokens can be used for both purposes.
- The ability to slash stake in OIS requires **unlocked** \$PYTH tokens, whereas staking for governance can use both locked and unlocked $PYTH tokens.
- All parameter related to the OIS protocol are subject to the governance of the Pyth DAO.

## Implementation

OIS implements the design principles above through the following structure:

1. OIS is subject to the same 7-day epoch as governance voting. All parameters used in the OIS protocol are captured at each start of the epoch on Thursdays at 0:00 UTC and remain constant until the end of the epoch. Staking into OIS is also subject to warmup and cooldown period prior and post epoch respectively.

2. Each publisher is programmatically assigned a staking pool where they can self-stake and to which other stakers can delegate.
   - The staking pool assigned to each publisher covers all price feeds/symbols they publish.
   - Each staking pool has a soft cap. This soft cap dynamically expands and shrinks given the number of symbols published by the assigned publisher.
   - Price feeds with a low number of publishers contribute more to the cap's expansion.
   - Staking into the pool can exceed the soft cap. However no rewards are paid for the excess amount. On the contrary, the excess amount is subject to the penalty if the assigned publisher's data is inaccurate.
   - The OIS protocol prioritizes self-stake attributed to the **publisher's stake** when distributing rewards to the publisher's pool.
   - All staking pools charge the same delegation fee for stakers who are delegating stake to one or many pools.
3. Each pool has a maximum reward rate per epoch, which applies only to the staked amount within the soft cap.
4. The total amount of rewards paid to all pools is bound by the same cap relative to the amount of rewards available to the OIS protocol.
5. Slashing of stake has a hard percentage cap and only impacts pools that assigned to publishers responsible for the poor data quality. Both self-stakers and delegators are also slashed proportionally to their staked amount in the impacted pools.
