Alice-007-凌凌七

As we enter 2026, the overall crypto market shows signs of recovery, with BTC prices stabilizing around $91,000, ETH hovering around $3,200, and BNB maintaining a level of approximately $880. The price fluctuations of these blue-chip assets remain relatively mild, providing a solid foundation for lending strategies. Particularly within the BNB chain ecosystem, the interest rate environment for lending protocols has become increasingly favorable. USD1, as a composable stablecoin, has created noticeable yield differentials across platforms, offering users clear arbitrage opportunities. Currently, Binance Earn is running a limited-time Booster program for USD1, offering up to a 20% annualized yield for the first 50,000 deposits. This promotion runs from the end of 2025 through January 31, 2026—making it an ideal window to capture high returns.

In the era of rapid blockchain development, decentralized storage solutions are gradually becoming industry focal points. As a network dedicated to efficient and secure data storage, the Walrus protocol is quietly transforming the way developers build applications through its unique architecture and innovative mechanisms. It is not merely a storage tool, but a developer platform specifically designed for the AI era, capable of supporting the formation and expansion of data markets. By integrating on-chain verification and a distributed node system, the protocol ensures data persistence and verifiability, allowing developers to handle large-scale datasets with greater confidence, without worrying about single points of failure or high costs associated with traditional cloud services. From a technical perspective, the core of Walrus lies in its Blob storage mechanism. This is a storage method specifically designed for large files, differing from traditional blockchain storage by breaking data into smaller, verifiable fragments distributed across a global node network. This design draws on distributed hash tables and erasure coding technologies, ensuring high availability even when some nodes go offline. For example, during a recent global cloud service outage, many centralized platforms such as AWS experienced widespread failures, but the Walrus network remained stable with no data loss or access latency. This resilience stems from its peer-to-peer architecture, where uploaded data automatically generates encrypted proofs that can be seamlessly integrated into smart contracts for smooth on-chain interaction. Walrus is built on the Sui blockchain, which gives it inherent advantages. Sui's parallel execution engine enables Walrus to handle high-throughput storage requests without sacrificing speed. Node operators participate in network maintenance through a staking mechanism, locking up a certain amount of tokens to ensure honest behavior; any malicious activity results in slashing penalties. This economic model not only incentivizes decentralization but also significantly reduces storage costs. According to the latest data, Walrus's average storage cost is just a fraction of traditional cloud services, meaning AI developers can economically store massive training datasets without budget overruns. Currently, the network has processed millions of Blob uploads, with total storage capacity reaching the PB level—already a leading indicator in the decentralized storage space. In AI applications, Walrus demonstrates enormous potential. Traditional AI model training relies on centralized data warehouses, which often lack transparency, leading to model bias or data tampering issues. Walrus addresses this by introducing provable data integrity, allowing developers to add version control and access policies to datasets. For instance, an AI project can upload model weight files and set retention periods, ensuring data cannot be deleted or modified within a specified timeframe. This is crucial for building auditable AI systems. Recently, Walrus has partnered with several AI startups, such as Talus Labs, which use Walrus as their default storage layer for hosting AI models. This maintains the fast response of the Sui network while enabling agents to process large volumes of data off-chain without slowing down the main chain. Imagine future AI agents directly pulling verified data from Walrus to make real-time decisions—all built on a decentralized foundation. Beyond AI, Walrus also shows great promise in gaming and content distribution. Game developers can use it to store NFT assets or user-generated content, ensuring these data remain permanently accessible, unlike centralized servers that may go offline due to maintenance. In DeFi, Walrus can provide reliable data storage for price oracles, reducing manipulation risks. The protocol is already integrated into multiple prediction market applications, such as Myriad Markets, which processes millions of dollars in transactions weekly, with all prediction result data fully verified on-chain through Walrus. This enhances market trust, encouraging participants to invest more freely. Performance data shows that since its mainnet launch, the number of nodes has exceeded hundreds, with average response times maintained at the millisecond level. Recent statistics indicate that active users have grown by over 30% in the past month, thanks to its developer-friendly toolkits. Walrus offers SDKs and CLI tools, enabling even non-blockchain experts to quickly upload and retrieve data. Additionally, the protocol supports cross-chain operations—while primarily built on Sui, its chain-agnostic design allows future expansion to other ecosystems, providing developers with flexibility and avoiding lock-in risks. On security, Walrus employs advanced cryptographic primitives such as zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption to ensure data privacy. Users can set fine-grained access controls—for example, allowing only specific addresses to view partial content of certain Blobs. This is especially critical in sensitive applications such as medical AI or financial model training. The protocol’s governance mechanism is also noteworthy: through community proposals, node operators and developers jointly decide on network upgrades, ensuring long-term sustainability. Looking ahead, Walrus is preparing to launch the Haulout 2025 event—a gathering for data builders and AI developers aimed at accelerating ecosystem adoption. A pre-event workshop is already live, featuring tutorials from architectural understanding to practical deployment. This will further drive protocol adoption. Currently, Walrus's ecosystem includes several well-known projects, collectively building a data-driven Web3 infrastructure. Overall, this protocol not only solves storage pain points but also ushers in a new era where data becomes an asset. Developers can create revenue-generating applications, and users can benefit from data value. Current market data shows the token price is stable around $0.14, with a 24-hour trading volume of $17 million and a market capitalization exceeding $230 million—indicators reflecting investor confidence in the protocol's potential.

In the encryption industry, financing news is often treated as material for hype, but what is truly valuable is not the amount of financing itself, but the quality and logic of the investors. APRO completed a $3 million seed round financing in October 2024, led by Polychain Capital and Franklin Templeton, and subsequently received strategic investment from Binance Labs (now called YZi Labs). This lineup is quite luxurious in the oracle track.
Let’s talk about Polychain Capital. This institution focuses on blockchain infrastructure investment and has always been cautious in its approach, but the projects it focuses on often have good long-term returns. Their investment logic is to seize opportunities for paradigm shifts—what is a paradigm shift? It is the upgrading and replacement of industry infrastructure. Oracles are a typical infrastructure, connecting on-chain and off-chain data, supporting the entire DeFi and Web3 ecosystem. Polychain betting on APRO clearly recognizes its differentiated potential in the Bitcoin ecosystem and AI oracle direction.

In recent years, the oracle track has been dominated by Chainlink, which holds over 80% market share, and many people even feel that there is no opportunity left in this field. However, a careful study reveals that the oracle market is actually diversifying, with different scenarios requiring different solutions. APRO takes a differentiated approach—focusing on the Bitcoin ecosystem and AI enhancement, which are precisely the areas where Chainlink is lacking.
First, let's talk about the Bitcoin ecosystem. Chainlink mainly serves Ethereum and other EVM-compatible chains, with relatively limited support for Bitcoin. However, in the last year or two, Bitcoin Layer 2 and sidechain projects have experienced explosive growth, with protocols like the Lightning Network, Stacks, RGB++, and Runes building a DeFi ecosystem based on Bitcoin. These projects require oracles to obtain off-chain data, but traditional Ethereum oracles find it difficult to connect directly. The advantage of APRO lies here—its design has considered the uniqueness of the Bitcoin ecosystem from the very beginning, natively supporting the Lightning Network and various Bitcoin Layer 2 protocols.

Data doesn't lie, but it also needs to be interpreted. Recently saw the latest operational data released by APRO: As of December 21, the network has completed a total of 89000 data verifications and 89000 AI oracle calls. At first glance, this number may not seem particularly impressive, but considering that the project only had its TGE on October 24, accumulating so much real usage in less than two months is quite remarkable.
First, let's talk about what data verification is. The core job of an oracle is to bring off-chain data onto the chain, but this process is not as simple as copy and paste. Each data request needs to go through a whole set of processes including multi-node verification, consensus confirmation, and cryptographic signing to ensure the accuracy and immutability of the data. 89000 verifications mean there are 89000 real business needs, corresponding to different DeFi protocols, prediction markets, and AI applications actually using APRO's services.

On December 23, APRO officially launched its sports data oracle service, covering mainstream events such as NFL, basketball, soccer, boxing, rugby, and badminton. After the news broke, the price quickly rose from around $0.10 to $0.12 within three days, an increase of more than 20%. This made me start to think about a question: Could sports data become a new growth point in the oracle sector?
Traditional oracle services mainly focus on price feeds, providing real-time quotes for various assets to DeFi protocols. Chainlink has already matured in this market, making it difficult for newcomers to shake it. However, sports data is a completely different field; it not only requires real-time processing but also needs to handle complex rule judgments and dispute resolutions. For example, in an NBA game, it involves not just the final score but also various player statistics, foul data, overtime determinations, and so on. This information is challenging for traditional oracles to process, as their original design intent is simple numerical transmission.