DIA, a blockchain oracle network serving over 250 decentralized applications across more than 60 blockchains, has taken aim at a long-standing pricing problem in institutional DeFi.
How do you price an asset that doesn’t trade on a market?
The Zug-based company launched DIA Value on March 10, a new oracle product that computes intrinsic fair value for illiquid digital assets, a segment representing over $100 billion in onchain capital that conventional price feeds can’t reliably serve.
The problem nobody wanted to solve
To understand why this matters, it helps to know what oracles do. Oracles are data feeds that connect blockchains to real-world pricing information.
DeFi lending protocols, platforms where users borrow and lend crypto, rely on oracles to determine whether collateral is worth enough to back a loan.
When prices are wrong, things break fast.
On October 10, 2025, things broke badly. A cascade of stressed market data pushed through oracles, triggering $19 billion in automated liquidations within 24 hours.
The positions were forcibly closed because the pricing layer said collateral was worth less than it was.
For thinly traded or completely illiquid assets, pricing risk isn’t accidental; it’s structural.
Sparse order books make markets easier to manipulate, while stale or limited data can distort risk models.
As a result, many protocols are forced to choose between relying on unreliable pricing or avoiding support for the asset altogether.
The $100 billion gap sits exactly here. Tokenized treasuries, yield-bearing stablecoins, and liquid staking tokens none of these trade continuously on liquid markets.
A yield-bearing stablecoin like satUSD+ doesn’t need a secondary market price; it needs someone to read what the underlying staking contract actually pays out.
That’s a fundamentally different question than “what did this last trade for?”
“Oracles were built to answer one question: how is the market valuing this asset?” said Dillon Hanson, DIA’s Head of Business Development.
“But when most institutional assets entering DeFi don’t trade on secondary markets, you need infrastructure that answers a different question: what is this asset fundamentally worth? That’s what Value does.”
How DIA Value actually works
DIA Value reads directly from smart contracts and reserve data rather than secondary markets.
For a token like stETH, it pulls the redemption rate straight from the protocol’s smart contract, pricing the asset at what it can actually be redeemed for, not what it last traded at on a thin exchange.
For a stablecoin backed by real-world collateral, it verifies reserves in real time.
The product is already live. Euler, Morpho, Silo, and Hydration are among the protocols using it across lending, stablecoin reserve verification, and tokenized securities.
Jeff Garzik, co-founder of Hemi Network, put the use case plainly:
“Bitcoin sitting idle is a trillion-dollar opportunity cost. hemiBTC lets holders deploy BTC productively into DeFi, but that only works if the pricing layer can verify the actual Bitcoin backing each token onchain. DIA Value does exactly that.”
Noah Boisserie, CEO of Cooper Labs futher emphasized this point: “When you operate a stablecoin across four chains, pricing fragmentation becomes a real engineering problem.”
“DIA Value solved this for us by computing USDp’s fair value directly from onchain redemption data, reading collateral composition and redemption curves from our smart contracts. One verifiable fundamental price, consistent everywhere. That’s what lets integrators treat USDp as reliable collateral without building custom pricing logic per chain,” the CEO added.
The product is built for institutional participants moving into DeFi and aligns with fair value accounting standards that require intrinsic valuation when markets are inactive.
“Traditional finance solved illiquid asset pricing decades ago with NAV calculations, mark-to-model frameworks, and reserve verification,” said Zygis Marazas, Head of Product at DIA.
“Blockchain makes it possible to execute those same methodologies with full transparency and 24/7 availability.”
DIA positions Value as a complement to its existing Market Oracle, which handles pricing for over 3,000 liquid assets.
Together, the two products cover the full spectrum, liquid and illiquid, giving DeFi protocols a single infrastructure layer for any collateral type they want to accept.
As institutional money keeps moving onchain, that full-spectrum coverage stops being a nice-to-have and starts being the entry ticket.
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