In the middle of the night while checking market prices, I noticed something strange—there was a clear time lag in the prices reported by several leading data sources. It’s not the normal market fluctuation; it’s more like someone has adjusted the clocks on different sources.

This situation is quite common in the crypto market. People tend to blame "whales" for price manipulation, but the real issue often lies deeper—the very lifeblood of the entire DeFi ecosystem: the pipeline that provides price data. Once this pipeline is tampered with, lending protocols, trading pairs, perpetual contracts… all applications relying on accurate price information will run on false data. This is what the industry calls the oracle problem.

APRO’s solution isn’t complicated; the core idea is simple: don’t trust a single source, replace it with decentralized collective verification.

How does it work? First, it doesn’t just fetch prices from one exchange or data provider. Instead, it pulls data from multiple independent sources simultaneously and submits them to a decentralized network of nodes for validation. Each node has a say, like a jury voting. Outliers are quickly identified and isolated, and the final on-chain price is a reasonably filtered consensus.

But voting alone isn’t enough; we also need to make bad actors "feel the pain." So, nodes are required to stake tokens as collateral. If they are proven to submit false data, their staked tokens are forfeited. The benefit of this approach is obvious—the cost of malicious behavior is directly locked in, discouraging anyone from risking token loss to do bad things.

This mechanism transforms the oracle from a single point of failure into a decentralized system with checks and balances and penalties. Simply put, it makes data falsification economically unfeasible.