Recently, people keep saying, “I saw on-chain…,” but the truth is that what you’re mostly seeing is “on-chain information relayed to you by someone else.” Block production by nodes is a fact; RPC is the window through which you ask for directions, and indexers are more like the community entrance’s delivery lockers: they’re fast, but the lockers update with a delay—sometimes even mis-sort your items—so you end up thinking the package hasn’t arrived yet. Especially during peak hours, once RPC load spikes, you’ll run into all kinds of latency and replay issues, and the transaction status you check may already be 1–2 blocks behind.

Lately, AI agents and automated trading have been hot too, and everyone keeps hyping “fully automated on-chain execution.” I’m more concerned about which RPC they actually connect to, whether they implement retries and multi-source verification, and how they manage signatures and permissions… Otherwise, even if the story moves fast, if security patches don’t keep up, what arrives late won’t be just data—it could be your assets. Anyway, when I look at the chain now, I’ve gotten into the habit of checking at least two data sources, otherwise I don’t feel at ease.