Cross-chain bridges are frequently hacked, but rarely do we hear about top-tier oracle breaches. The underlying differences are worth pondering.

Security is often a binary world of 0s and 1s. You may have seen exchanges being robbed or liquidity pools drained, but oracles, as the "eyes" of DeFi, once compromised, can paralyze the entire ecosystem. Therefore, their protective measures are always at a nuclear level.

Most projects have only one line of defense—if the private key is exposed, the account funds are immediately wiped out. However, some leading oracles employ a dual-layer defense system. The first layer is hardware-level stealth: the computation runs inside a trusted execution environment (TEE) of the CPU, creating a physically isolated "black box" where even the node operators cannot see the internal data, making it nearly impossible for hackers to attack.

The second layer is Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus— to tamper with data on the network, an attacker must control more than two-thirds of the validation nodes simultaneously. As long as one honest node remains online, it will trigger the penalty mechanism (Slashing), instantly zeroing out the staked deposits of any malicious nodes.

The security cost of such measures even exceeds that of attacking the Bitcoin network. For this reason, many large institutions and top exchanges are willing to rely on these oracle solutions for their core data.

In simple terms, purchasing such security solutions is like buying a bodyguard service in the Web3 era. The more chaotic the world, the more valuable professional security becomes.