At the beginning of the year, if you had to name the most obscure thing in the Bitcoin ecosystem, oracle definitely ranks high—feeling like a fire hydrant in a neighborhood: very useful but hardly noticeable. It wasn't until the end of the year review that I realized how naive I was back then. Actually, it’s not that I couldn’t understand this thing, but I didn’t see clearly how the move towards Bitcoin financialization was being played out.

The Bitcoin ecosystem is a bit like a deep-sea submarine. The surface appears calm, but undercurrents are raging. Oracles are not just decorations—they are clearly the submarine’s oxygen circulation system. On land, no one cares about oxygen when messing around, but once you dive into the DeFi deep sea, without this system, you can’t survive even a few minutes.

We were all too confident before. Used to the familiar oracle solutions on Ethereum, we saw oracles as just tools for "checking vegetable prices." This stereotype obscured a critical fact: Bitcoin and Ethereum are fundamentally two different game rules. This year, Bitcoin Layer2 solutions emerged one after another, liquidity was fragmented into pieces, shattered into grains of sand, and no matter how you tried, you couldn’t piece it back together.

The brilliance of oracles lies in their transformation. They are no longer just "messengers carrying data," but have upgraded to become the "central nervous system" of the ecosystem. What they do is not only push Bitcoin prices, but more importantly, through a unique asset proof mechanism, they verify the authenticity of cross-chain assets in real time. Remember the liquidation wave in the third quarter? Many protocols relying on old-fashioned oracles got wrecked—price responses were sluggish, slippage was terrifyingly high—but platforms using this new scheme remained steady, reacting so quickly that you’d miss it if you blinked. At that moment, the market finally understood: safety and speed have never been a choice.