I now look at on-chain data and generally assume "it might be a few seconds to a few minutes late," so I don't trust those dashboards as the absolute truth... Especially when you're watching a specific swap/liquidation, that tiny delay can be enough for you to misjudge.

The reason is quite simple: you're connecting to someone’s RPC, whether they have rate limiting/queuing, whether the node is behind on height; further down the line, there are indexers/parsing services, block grabbing, database entry, metric calculations, caching—each layer can have delays and packet loss. To put it plainly, what you see as "on-chain" is often "on-chain as translated by someone else."

Recently, AI agents/auto-trading have been quite popular, but I worry more that they default to using the same public RPC + indexer, with narratives blown out of proportion and safety details not carefully considered: data is half a beat slow + simulation inconsistencies, so no matter how smart the strategy, mistakes can happen. Anyway, whenever I make on-chain judgments now, I first check which data source it’s from, whether there's a secondary reference source, and I prefer to be a bit slower.