In 2023, I watched helplessly as our team's promising derivatives protocol died on the oracle. It wasn't that the code had vulnerabilities, nor that the economic model collapsed, but rather that our lifeline, the data source, was both expensive and sluggish, like a rope tightly choking our neck of innovation. At that time, we were using the industry leader Chainlink; it was not wrong, it was stable, but it was like a wrench suitable only for tightening standard screws, while we were facing a brand new engine that required precise assembly.
To understand why the data track of Web3 needs to evolve from Chainlink to new species like APRO, we cannot just look at the comparison of feature lists. We have to return to the origin of a builder, first talking about what 'old problems' Chainlink solved for us, then looking at what 'new troubles' we frontline developers are encountering now, and finally examining APRO's solution, which is where its intelligence lies.
The greatness of Chainlink lies in its solution to the most fundamental trust issue in Web3: 'Garbage in, garbage out.' Before its emergence, smart contracts were isolated black boxes, and to know external information (like the price of ETH), it could only be fed in a centralized manner, which itself contradicted the original intention of decentralization. Chainlink beautifully solved this problem with its decentralized oracle network (DONs). You can think of it as a pricing committee composed of numerous independent quote providers who obtain prices from different exchanges, take extreme values, calculate an average, and finally stamp a commonly recognized result to deliver it onto the chain. It provides a kind of 'credibility of results', allowing you to believe that this result has been verified by multiple parties and is reliable. For the vast majority of DeFi Lego at that time, this was sufficient.
However, the pace of Web3 development far exceeds the iteration speed of infrastructure. As our ambitions shift from simple lending and trading to more complex derivatives, RWA, and even on-chain AI, 'new troubles' arise. Do you remember the failed project I mentioned at the beginning? We needed 'implied volatility' data dynamically calculated based on real-time data from multiple options markets, rather than a simple price. If we want Chainlink to provide this service, we need to fund a new DON network ourselves, which is prohibitively expensive; moreover, the data after such complex calculations cannot keep up with the rapidly changing market. In the end, we were forced to compromise, set up a centralized server to calculate, and then feed the results onto the chain, which is essentially a form of self-betrayal. At that moment, I deeply understood that the 'verified data' provided by Chainlink is essentially a service with extremely high 'consensus costs'. It is suitable for providing public goods (like mainstream coin prices), but for countless customized, high-frequency, and computation-intensive application scenarios, it proves to be inadequate. What we developers need is no longer just a trustworthy data feeder, but a reliable 'computing outsourcing service'.
This is the lifeblood that APRO taps into. APRO's approach has undergone a fundamental shift; it is no longer obsessed with 'proving the result is correct', but has shifted to 'proving the computation process is trustworthy'. This is a dimensional shift from 'data oracle' to 'verifiable computing infrastructure'. For example, Chainlink is like a group of accountants who tell you the final financial report number is 1,000,000 after complex audits, and you choose to trust their expertise and credibility. In contrast, APRO provides you with a set of encrypted, automated accounting software and auditing tools, running all computation processes (no matter how complex) in an immutable 'trusted execution environment' (TEE), ultimately generating a 'fraud proof' or 'ZK proof'. This proof is like an encrypted computation draft that can be quickly and cheaply verified on the chain. Smart contracts no longer need to blindly trust the 'result', but can personally verify the 'process'. This logic directly addresses our dilemma from years ago: we can run complex volatility models on APRO's network, which will only deliver the final result and that lightweight 'computation draft' to us, and the on-chain contract can execute as long as it checks the draft is fine. The entire process is extremely low-cost, fast, and does not require assembling an expensive 'pricing committee' for every small demand.
Therefore, the evolution from Chainlink to APRO is not a zero-sum game of replacement, but an inevitable trend of Web3 moving from 'trusting data' to 'trusting computation'. Chainlink is the contributor to building highways, allowing information to flow on and off the chain. APRO, on the other hand, establishes countless modular, high-performance 'computing factories' alongside the highway, enabling various complex applications to run at low cost and high efficiency. As the boundaries of Web3 applications continue to expand, the demand for verifiable computing capability will only grow.
After so much discussion, let's return to reality. Besides oracles, what other infrastructure has held you back during the development of DApps? Let's talk about it in the comments section and see if it's a common pain point for us builders.
Disclaimer: This article only represents personal views and does not constitute any investment advice. The risks in the cryptocurrency market are extremely high, please conduct your own research before making any decisions.
