At three in the morning, I pressed the close position button. The long position on $ZEC was cut by ninety percent, and I felt like I had been drained, slumping in my chair. My account balance indeed increased, the numbers showing profit, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the candlestick chart, fearing that the next moment might see a sudden surge, making my heart feel like it was about to jump out of my chest.

But it wasn’t just the fear of missing out. A deeper fear stemmed from a thought: what if, in the 0.1 seconds I pressed that button, the execution price the platform pushed to me wasn’t the real market price at all? What if the price was delayed or tampered with? Would my current profit still count?

This question pulled me into a problem I hadn’t seriously considered before—within this ecosystem, the true determinant of my wins and losses might not be my trading strategy, but those behind-the-scenes "data carriers."

**Seemingly perfect strategies get stuck at the "truth of data" checkpoint**

We spend all day watching minute and hourly charts, analyzing technical indicators, tracking major capital flows, thinking we’re engaging in a real-time battle with the market. But honestly, most people don’t notice a key fact—there’s actually a "data barrier" between you and the market.

Does the real-time price flickering on your screen truly represent the global market consensus? Not necessarily.

Is your liquidation point really the true market price that penetrates through? Uncertain.

Are the data sources used for contract settlement truly transparent, multi-source data, or are they fed by a centralized price oracle? That’s even more complicated.

Thinking about these things gives me a chill. Many trading platforms rely on oracles, and there are a ton of issues: data updates might lag by several seconds, data sources might be just one or two easily manipulated points, and during network congestion peaks, the prices fed to you might not reflect the real-time spot market.

**What’s more painful is that most people don’t see this layer at all.**

You only see your account balance changing, your stop-loss orders executing inexplicably, or contracts liquidating suddenly even though the fundamentals haven’t changed. Few people investigate where the data comes from or whether it’s trustworthy.

Platforms don’t proactively clarify these details. Once they do, users start asking questions: Why are your oracle data always a half beat behind? Why is there such a big deviation between the price I see and the spot price? Why do some "sudden crashes" seem to only liquidate your platform’s users?

**That’s why I’ve started paying attention to the "data sources."**

Last year, I experienced a bizarre liquidation on a major exchange—my contract was suddenly hit with a stop-loss at a time when the market showed no movement. Later, I found out that their price feed was 15 seconds behind the spot market. In those 15 seconds, my order was already dead. The customer service reply was "system delay due to force majeure." Force majeure. Just listen to that phrase.

After that, I began researching different platforms’ data sources. The more I looked, the more scared I became—some platforms mainly rely on CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap, which are aggregators of secondhand information; others build their own data sources but only pull from a few major exchanges; some even rely on a single data source, and if that source has issues, the entire system is compromised.

Not to mention smaller exchanges, which, to control risk, might artificially introduce delays in the displayed transaction prices. Sounds "safe," but in reality, it’s just a covert way to eat into users’ slippage.

**Are the big winners really smarter because of better strategies?**

Sometimes not. Lucky traders catch periods when data sources are stable, and their stop-loss and take-profit orders execute as expected; unlucky ones get caught in data delays, and trades that could have been profitable are stopped out due to untimely price feeds.

I call this unseen but impactful factor the "data black box." Most traders are blindly groping inside this black box, thinking they hold the initiative, but in fact, they’re already being played by the logic of data feeding.

Now, my first criterion for choosing a trading platform isn’t leverage or fees, but: where does your data come from? How often is it updated? Is there a multi-source redundancy mechanism? Is there an emergency plan if the oracle fails?

After asking these questions, few exchanges can give clear answers.