In my Fluid post, I mentioned that project design involves tradeoffs. This tradeoff is more evident in the relationship between the optimistic assumptions of the UMA oracle and the price of the token. As the leading oracle holding 85.5% of the Polymarket market share, the price of UMA has been declining, failing to become a "Polymarket MEME" and even lacking a decent period of hype.

Aside from market environment and liquidity issues, UMA's Optimistic Oracle (OO) mechanism, while enabling it to provide event-based judgments, such as whether Trump will win the election, and offering richer data types than price feed oracles like Chainlink, thus becoming the primary oracle for Polymarket, is essentially a passive arbitration model. Unless someone objects to the result, it is assumed to be correct. In contrast, Chainlink, also an oracle, generates revenue. This is because Chainlink nodes act more like "porters," moving price data onto the chain. Applications need to pay for data updates, a subscription-based or pay-per-use revenue model. Every data point update, every cross-chain message pass (CCIP), and every virtual random number (VRF) generated by Chainlink constitutes a specific paid service. Chainlink's revenue increases with the development of the DeFi market. More importantly, the Chainlink protocol itself is the entry point for data on-chain; DeFi protocols cannot access data without payment. UMA's working principle is more like a rotating judge adjudicating a case. Data verification occurs between the UMA proposer and the market contract; the protocol doesn't even need to know the transaction occurred. Because the vast majority of prediction market decisions do not trigger a dispute resolution process (DVM), the UMA protocol fails to capture value from the high-frequency interactions of users on Polymarket. Furthermore, to lower the user barrier and avoid the economic assumptions about security becoming invalid due to a drop in UMA, USDC is used as the collateral and reward token, further compressing UMA's functionality into a low-frequency governance and security staking tool.

LINK has continued to flow out of exchanges over the past month, with a net outflow of over $120 million

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