In the crypto ecosystem, those who survive never rely on luck.

Three years ago, on a night in the dormitory, my junior ran nodes while her computer was overheating. Now she works as a top headhunter at a café in Singapore and paid off her student loans earlier this year. What was the turning point? An early airdrop. But if you really look at the logic behind it, you'll understand—this isn't the favor of Lady Luck, but her betting on the right direction of an era.

BTC is transforming from "digital gold" into "interest-bearing assets." What does this transition require? It requires a machine capable of real-time quotes that never errs. Decentralized oracle protocols are the role players here. You can think of it this way: if BTC is the gold bars in a safe, then the oracle is that "truth machine" that never sleeps 24/7, constantly telling the world how much the gold bars are worth.

The danger of on-chain finance is— a one-second price deviation can trigger a liquidation avalanche worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The importance of oracle protocols lies in their ability to compress data response times to sub-second levels through a unique consensus mechanism. This isn't some flashy innovation; it's an upgrade to infrastructure.

The node testing my junior participated in back then was essentially laying the foundation for the entire DeFi ecosystem. Those early participants witnessed not just the growth of a project, but the entire process of on-chain finance evolving from "concept" to "practicality." This is true insight—identifying underlying protocols that solve real problems is far more valuable than chasing trends.