At 2 a.m., a group of retail investors suddenly exploded with activity. Usually the most reserved Wang Ge sent out a rare message— a screenshot of the node backend, showing the oracle node that has been operating for 539 days, with the net profit over the last 30 days: $87,000.

The entire group fell silent for several minutes. Finally, someone tentatively asked, "Is this... real?"

Wang Ge simply replied, "Last year, while you guys were all in on various new coins, I was busy figuring out how to build a stable data service infrastructure."

How exactly does this "toll booth" business make money?

Later, I discussed the logic behind it with Wang Ge, and it’s indeed not as simple as it seems:

**What is the core business model?**

To put it plainly, it’s not about trading coins, but about "collecting data tolls." Every on-chain data request—such as a DeFi project needing real-time BTC prices, or a lending protocol fetching collateral data—must go through an oracle node. Each transfer earns the node operator a tiny fee (usually between $0.0001 and $0.001).

Think of it like a toll booth on a highway.

By Q4 2025, the daily request volume on this "highway" has exceeded 41 million. Old Wang’s node is stationed right on this route.

**Where does the $87,000 come from?**

Wang Ge broke down the revenue components for me:

The majority comes from basic service fees (65%)—simply the labor fee for responding to data requests. The second largest is accuracy rewards (25%)—nodes that provide data with high consensus with others get extra rewards. A small portion (10%) comes from niche data premiums—he specifically optimized the response speed for Southeast Asian real estate tokenization assets, which are niche but high-demand data with high unit prices.

"If you only want to earn from common data fees like ETH prices, how much can you make in a month?" Wang Ge shook his head, "The real money comes from those niche but high-value data streams—port inventory, energy spot prices, on-chain interactions of specific assets. Others may not want to do these, but in the ecosystem, there are indeed people willing to pay."