The most easily overlooked source of risk in DeFi is often not in the smart contract logic, but in the data itself.

Price feed delays, single data sources, abnormal fluctuations—these all sound like minor issues, but when market volatility intensifies, these flaws can amplify the risk tenfold. A natural question is: in real on-chain incidents, the root cause is rarely due to poorly designed products; more often, it’s because data has gone awry under extreme conditions. Frequent abnormal liquidations, system crashes, skyrocketing user operation costs—all point back to the same issue—insufficient data reliability.

Some infrastructure providers are working to make data services truly trustworthy public capabilities. How? Redundant backups, multi-source verification, fail-safes under pressure, and completely transparent results. It sounds simple, but in reality, this is the key to whether the DeFi ecosystem can support more complex financial structures.

Once data is stable, protocols dare to innovate. Funds are willing to stay long-term in the ecosystem. Only then can the ecosystem truly expand in scale.

If you’re doing long-term value screening, consider this from another perspective: When can you truly assess the capability of an infrastructure? Not during calm, uneventful periods, but during stress tests under extreme market conditions. That’s the true litmus test.