In the past two years, every time there is a Federal Reserve meeting night, most of my friends involved in contracts stay up all night. It's not because they love work so much, but because they have seen it happen too many times: once the interest rates are announced, there's a big drop in the market, and before they can understand the situation, the clearing message has already been sent to their phones. Upon careful investigation afterward, sometimes it's not about how high their leverage is, but rather that in that instant, the oracle fed an outrageous price, causing the entire risk control system to be thrown off track.
It also started from those few times that I seriously focused on APRO, a project that is 'born to be an oracle'. It has a slightly different characteristic, treating itself completely as 'part of the risk system', rather than just a simple data intermediary. For example, during periods of extreme volatility, it employs many subtle strategies: increasing the weight of highly liquid exchanges, extending the price sampling window, and tagging obviously abnormal price jumps with an 'observe' label, rather than blindly pushing data onto the chain. You can understand it as preferring to be a little slow for a moment during the craziest seconds of the market, rather than stuffing a bunch of junk prices into the clearing contract.
What’s even more interesting is that it treats 'event days' as first-class citizens in its modeling. Events like CPI announcements, non-farm payrolls, major earnings reports, and even certain sports finals are pre-written into the configuration, automatically switching to more conservative pricing rules as the time window approaches. Given that more and more DeFi protocols like to 'ride the real-world hot topics,' this importance will only increase — just think about the emotions running high at a live event, and then on-chain there’s a weird yin-yang needle, that scene is simply mesmerizing.
Recently, the price of APRO itself has been fluctuating within a relatively clear range, and the ups and downs are inevitable, but the volume structure is still solid: there’s no obvious linear surge created from pure air, more like a slow climb with new integrations and new chain support. Metrics like on-chain call frequency, participating nodes, and the number of supported assets are also steadily increasing. To summarize in a slightly clichéd but sincere way: it’s not skyrocketing like crazy, but it resembles a foundational layer project that is 'genuinely selling services.'
Of course, that being said, oracles are always 'in the news when something goes wrong, and nobody praises them when nothing happens.' If you really expect one day it will make the trending topics by itself, it’s likely a sign that the entire chain is facing big problems. So my current habitual thought process is actually quite simple: when the market is good, see if it quietly engages in a bit more business; when the market is terrible, see if it can at least stand firm without any issues. Infrastructure that can achieve these two points is, in an increasingly emotional market, a scarce commodity.
Writing to this point, I want to leave myself a little reminder: next time I encounter those nights where I’m still watching the FOMC live stream at dawn, don’t just focus on the K-line cursing the market maker, take a moment to check if the data line hidden at the bottom is jumping normally. After all, many times what truly decides the outcome of your account is not 'what old Powell said,' but who on-chain is helping you maintain that key price level. @APRO Oracle #APRO $AT
