Oracle overview - will they drive the next bull run?

For those who don't know, oracles are a crucial part of any defi service. By definition, oracles are data feeds that make off-chain data sources available to the blockchain for smart contracts. Without oracles, smart contracts wouldn't be possible.

Tbh, I didn't pay much attention to this ecosystem in the past. However, as liquid staking increases, and more solutions appear every day, I am starting to realize oracle's value in the crypto space.

Just by looking at some of the stats from defillama, you can see how big and important they are. Chainlink, as an industry leader, secures at the moment 348 protocols, and it has roughly 11b USD secured across different platforms. Surprisingly enough, oracles from the most popular sites like CG or CMC are not even in top 20. First question that came to my mind is about the trustworthiness of data shown on those sites. Would love to hear your opinion on that...

I heard before for some of these projects, like Band, UMA, DIA, API3, but all of them combined don't get close to Chainlink in terms of protocols that are using them. Why is that?

In addition, since we all preach about decentralization, I would definitely love to see other oracles taking a piece of Chainlink's cake. I get that they are the first to enable off-chain data to the blockchain and hats off for everything they achieved, but it would be also great to see different protocols relying on other oracles as well. For the sake of data.

As a final note, with the NFT hype slowly dying, and defi being the main catalyst in the previous bull run, do you think that oracles can be the main force for the next bull run? I see this space growing with each new protocol launched, with each new dapp built, which can eventually bring FOMO around projects that are building oracles...

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