The hot spots in the crypto market change too quickly. One moment they are in the spotlight, and the next moment no one cares. In the end, only a bunch of small-cap assets with shallow trading depth and difficult price discovery remain — these are the so-called long-tail assets. They could be ecosystem tokens on new public chains, new runes within the Bitcoin ecosystem, or governance tokens of a DAO.

From the perspective of DeFi protocols, these assets are like unexploited virgin lands. Theoretically, they offer high returns, but the risks are equally enormous. The core issue is: how can we provide a fair, manipulation-resistant, and trustable price for these assets that lack depth, have dispersed trading, and are easily manipulated by a few large orders?

The traditional oracle approach — collecting data from several major exchanges and averaging — has completely failed. Why? Because these assets are often not listed on top-tier exchanges; they might only exist in a liquidity pool on a DEX or be scattered across a few small exchanges with low trading volume. Any slightly larger buy or sell order can create false high or low prices.

This creates a vicious cycle: without reliable price sources, lending protocols hesitate to accept them as collateral; derivatives protocols cannot develop products based on them; in turn, this suppresses liquidity and practical use cases. Long-tail assets remain stuck in this deadlock.

To truly solve this problem, we cannot rely on the old "collection and aggregation" approach. Instead, we need to design a completely new mechanism — one that can adapt to the realities of low liquidity and dispersed markets, establishing a dynamic price discovery and verification system. This is not just a technical challenge but also an attempt to redefine DeFi pricing logic.