When I scrolled to that screenshot of Duan Yongping at 3 a.m., my mind buzzed—single account profit of $33 million. Fourteen years ago, after Steve Jobs passed away, he heavily invested in Apple, ultimately yielding an 1881% return. The comment section was full of sentiments, but as I stared at that image, I suddenly felt uneasy: what if the timeline had changed? What if Apple hadn’t developed Apple Pay or missed the cloud computing wave? Then the so-called 'great company' would just be Schrödinger’s cat on the timeline.

Here lies the most common trap—using the certainty of the past to package the uncertainty of the future. It wasn’t until I delved into the architecture design of a certain Oracle project that I realized a key shift: Duan Yongping’s bet wasn’t on Apple as a company, but on the fact that 'Apple continues to generate verifiable value.'

In the crypto world, these types of Oracle systems are building what’s called a 'real-time value discovery mechanism.' Unlike traditional financial reports that lag 90 days, they directly capture on-chain real activity data—such as the daily actual fee income of a DeFi protocol, creator royalty flows in the NFT ecosystem, or even cross-chain bridge asset reuse efficiency—and convert this information into a 'on-chain profitability index.' In other words, while Duan Yongping looked at cash flow statements back then, we now observe the real-time flow of value on the blockchain.

What does this change? When searching for the next 'Apple-level' crypto project, you no longer need to gamble on a narrative. Instead, you can see the true business activity happening through verifiable on-chain data. This is the shift from 'rearview mirror investing' to 'real-time value discovery.'