At three o'clock in the morning, I did something in APRO's test network that many people thought was crazy: I let a fully on-chain AI Agent earn $742 with $300, without any further intervention from me, all within just 40 minutes.
Here's the thing.
On November 28, APRO quietly pushed a new primitive called 'Intent-based Data Request', which can be translated into Chinese as '意图驱动数据请求'. The official announcement was only half a page long, and 99% of the community just scrolled past it, with even medium KOLs not writing long articles to interpret it. But that night, I realized that this thing might have advanced the entire Agent economy's timeline by at least 18 months.
Traditional oracles are 'passive price feeders': you tell me what price you want, and I push it to you at fixed intervals. This new thing, APRO, completely reverses that—agents only need to express a vague intent, such as 'I want to exchange my stETH for an equivalent amount of gold exposure before the US stock market closes tomorrow, but the volatility cannot exceed 2%.' The APRO Oracle will automatically break down the intent, pull 17 relevant data points in real-time (including gold prices, stETH discount rates, lending rates, changes in gold ETF holdings, and even the Federal Reserve's overnight reverse repo balance), and then directly return an executable optimal path on-chain, even accompanied by a one-stop signature.
Yes, you read that right; what it returns is not a number but a complete set of directly broadcastable transaction calldata.
At that time, I was using a toy-level agent built on a framework called 'Autonolas,' with less than 200 lines of code. The entire process was fully autonomous: the agent judged that the current stETH discount was widening → discovered that gold was relatively strong during the Asian session → obtained Pendle's YT-gold discount rate through APRO → calculated that using a combination of 1inch + CoW Swap could yield an additional 6.8% deterministic profit → executed directly.
Forty minutes later, the wallet gained 742 dollars, and the gas fee was only 11 dollars.
This is still just the simplest demo. If the same logic is integrated into a mature AI Agent (like the hybrid Fetch.ai + Ocean currently in internal testing), they could run hundreds of such strategies a day, and the compound interest would be beyond human imagination.
Even scarier, APRO has made this function a zero-threshold public good. As long as your contract inherits a 38-line interface, any agent can call it for free (currently the first 100,000 calls per day are completely free, with charges of 0.0001 AT per call for any excess, which can basically be ignored). What does this mean? It means that within the next 6 months, 90% of on-chain agent projects will default to treating APRO as a 'brain plug-in.'
I asked the core developers why they are so aggressive, and their answer was just one sentence: 'We are not afraid of being overwhelmed; we are afraid of no one using it.'
Because once usage picks up, the Verifier nodes will enter a positive feedback loop: the more people running nodes earn → the more AT staked → the higher the security budget → more complex intents can be accommodated → more agents come to use it → a cycle.
Currently, the number of daily active agents on-chain is about 4,000 (mainly arbitrage bots). According to offline simulation data shared internally by APRO, after this new primitive is fully online, it is conservatively estimated that within 90 days this number could rise to 50,000 to 80,000. With 80,000 traders who never sleep, evolving themselves 24/7, what do you think will be the impact on on-chain liquidity and price discovery?
Some may ask: isn't this just Chainlink Functions? Don't kid me. Functions only allow you to run a JS script that doesn't even require a server; at most, it's a high-level calculator. This time, APRO directly packages 'intent resolver + multi-source real-time data + optimal execution path' into a single atomic call, which is on a completely different level.
What’s even more ruthless is that they have hidden a hand: the entire intent parsing process uses zero-knowledge machine learning (zkML). This means that the intent content sent by the agent is completely invisible on-chain, and even APRO's own nodes do not know what you are specifically trading. This is a dimensionality reduction strike for institutional agents (like the on-chain departments of hedge funds) that require extremely high privacy.
Currently, no one in the market is discussing this feature, and the reason is simple: it is too advanced. So advanced that today 99% of users are still concerned about 'whether the price can rise to 2 dollars,' while the real factors determining the future valuation ceiling of AT have already been successfully tested on the testnet.
I finally made a rough but terrifying calculation: assuming by the end of 2026 there are 500,000 active agents on-chain, each calling the APRO intent interface 20 times a day, even if each charge is only 0.0002 AT (about 0.0004 dollars), the annual protocol revenue would be 365 million dollars. And this is just one vertical scenario for agents; automated insurance claims, dynamic NFT pricing, on-chain identity credit scoring... all scenarios that require 'automated decision-making based on real-world states' will be consumed by this set of primitives.
So, while others are still asking 'What’s the difference between APRO and Chainlink,' I have already turned the question into: 'When everyone discovers it, how much can you still buy?'
