Can you imagine such a scenario? An entrepreneur sets up a lemonade stand on the roadside, but spends a fortune to hire a special forces team equipped with infrared sensors and 24-hour shift rotations to guard the cash register. It sounds absurd, but in the Web3 ecosystem of late 2025, such mismatched phenomena have become the norm. Many early-stage protocols are using the most expensive security solutions to address problems that don't require such levels of protection.

Take the oracle field as an example. Chainlink is like the "knight in armor" in the financial world—its security is almost impeccable. But the problem is, for early projects that have just secured funding and have a TVL (Total Value Locked) of less than five million dollars, this armor is heavy enough to crush their already fragile cash flow.

Why is this happening? Looking at Chainlink’s operational logic makes it clear. Its architecture is essentially an extremely costly elite review process. Every time price data is updated, multiple high-quality independent nodes must reach consensus off-chain, then push the result onto the chain. It sounds reliable, but at what cost? Each data push requires Gas fees, plus payments to the nodes.

If you are a derivatives protocol with only three-digit daily trading volume, paying several LINK tokens every few minutes just to maintain accurate price information is like using an anti-tank cannon to kill mosquitoes—technically feasible, but economically nonsensical.

From a technical design perspective, Chainlink uses a "Push Model." It’s like an expensive food delivery service that delivers on schedule—whether you’re hungry or not, the delivery person will arrive punctually at your door, and you still have to pay the delivery fee. For giants like Aave or Synthetix, whose trading volumes can support these fixed costs, using Chainlink makes sense. But for smaller protocols that don’t have enough scale? The situation is completely reversed.

This is the core contradiction in the current oracle track: the cost structure designed to ensure security ends up blocking the small projects that most need flexible pricing.