The 'Trojan Horse' of Traditional Finance: How is APRO bringing Wall Street's money onto the chain?

There is a question that has never been publicly discussed, but I think it is particularly crucial: someone in the founding team of @APRO-Oracle has previously worked in the blockchain department at JPMorgan. This background stands out in an industry full of 'DeFi purists.'

There is a hierarchy of disdain in the crypto circle: DeFi veterans look down on CeFi workers, and on-chain natives look down on the 'traitors' coming from TradFi (traditional finance). However, I believe that this 'dual identity' is precisely APRO's greatest advantage—it understands the rules of the crypto world while also knowing the ins and outs of Wall Street. This 'bilingual ability' is the key to the success of RWA (real-world asset tokenization).

Let's first talk about a harsh reality: the RWA market is still very small, with the global tokenized asset scale only a few hundred billion dollars, far from the $16 trillion predicted by BCG. Why? Because traditional financial institutions are afraid to play.

There are three reasons they are hesitant: First, on-chain data is not trustworthy (who guarantees that this tokenized Treasury actually has a Treasury behind it?); second, compliance risks are high (will the SEC suddenly say one day "you are in violation"?); third, the technical barrier is high (the IT systems of traditional brokerages speak a different language than blockchain).

What APRO needs to do is solve these three pain points - and its approach is simply a "Trojan horse".

Let's first talk about data credibility. Where is traditional financial institutions' data? In paid systems like Bloomberg terminals, Reuters Eikon, and FactSet. These data subscriptions cost tens of thousands of dollars a year and have strict usage restrictions - you cannot freely redistribute them, or you will violate the agreement.

Oracles like Chainlink and Pyth primarily source their data from crypto-native sources - APIs from centralized exchanges (CEX) and on-chain data from decentralized exchanges (DEX). Although they also claim to connect to traditional financial data, they rarely actually purchase Bloomberg terminals or connect to the SWIFT network. Why? Because the costs are too high, and their primary clients (DeFi protocols) have little demand for TradFi data.

But APRO is different. Its founding team has worked at JPMorgan, knowing how to deal with these traditional data providers. More importantly, APRO has the support of YZi Labs (Binance's ecological fund) and Franklin Templeton (a global asset management giant). These two endorsements allow APRO to negotiate with Bloomberg and Reuters for data access as an "institutional-level client."

I heard someone in the community say that APRO is already testing direct access to US Treasury price data from Bloomberg terminals. Although the official confirmation is not public, clues can be seen from some hints - for example, in a pilot RWA project, the Treasury prices provided by APRO have an error of less than 0.05% compared to those on the Bloomberg terminal, a level of precision that is unlikely to be obtained from public APIs.

Once the data source is resolved, the next issue is compliance. This is the most headache-inducing aspect of RWA - regulatory rules vary by country, the US has SEC's Reg D, the EU has the MiCA framework, and Singapore has the MAS's digital asset guidelines. When traditional brokerages engage in tokenization, the first step is to "find a lawyer to study compliance," which can take several months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

APRO's AI node comes in handy here. It can automatically scrape documents from regulatory bodies in various countries (like the SEC's EDGAR database and the EU's ESMA reports), use natural language processing technology to extract key clauses, and generate a "compliance checklist". For example, if a tokenized real estate fund wants to issue in the US, the AI will automatically check: does it meet the qualified investor requirements of Reg D? Has it disclosed enough risk information? Is it compliant at the state level?

The value of this "AI compliance assistant" is no less than the data validation itself. Because it significantly reduces the compliance costs of RWA projects - from hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees down to a few thousand dollars in AI usage fees. With costs lowered, more institutions are willing to try.

What about the technical barrier? Traditional brokerages' systems use enterprise-level tech stacks like Java and .NET, which are completely different worlds from blockchain's Solidity and Rust. It is basically impossible to ask a Wall Street IT department to learn smart contract development.

The solution provided by APRO is "API encapsulation". It encapsulates complex on-chain operations into traditional financial institutions' familiar REST APIs - brokers only need to call a few HTTP interfaces to put asset data on-chain and obtain on-chain verification results. The underlying smart contracts, gas fee management, and cross-chain synchronization are all handled by APRO.

This "dimensional adaptation" reflects the TradFi background of the APRO team. They know what traditional institutions' IT departments are thinking and fearing, so they can design products that the other party is willing to use.

But the most impressive aspect is APRO's "Trojan horse strategy" - it does not directly approach top investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (who look down on small projects), but rather cuts in from the "edge institutions".

For example, the collaboration between APRO and Plume Network. Plume is a new public chain specifically for RWA, targeting small and medium-sized asset management companies, family offices, and regional banks that want to try tokenization but are hesitant to take too much risk. These institutions have assets (such as tens of millions of dollars in bond portfolios, hundreds of properties) but lack the technical capability to tokenize themselves.

APRO provides Plume with a comprehensive solution: data validation (using AI to analyze audit reports and verify asset authenticity), compliance checks (automatically matching local regulatory requirements), and cross-chain bridging (if institutions want to issue tokens on Ethereum or BNB Chain). Plume packages these into "RWA as a service" and sells them to end customers.

Customers using Plume's services are actually using APRO's oracle - but they may not even know about APRO's existence, just that "Plume is very useful." This is the essence of the "Trojan horse strategy": not seeking fame, but seeking penetration.

What will happen when these edge institutions taste success (for example, liquidity has improved after tokenization, and financing costs have decreased)? They will become "living advertisements" for APRO, attracting more institutions to follow suit. Moreover, these early cases will accumulate into data - "RWA projects validated by APRO have a 15% lower default rate than traditional projects" and "compliance costs are saved by an average of 70%."

With this data backing, APRO can approach giants like Goldman Sachs and BlackRock with much more confidence. This is a typical "rural encirclement of cities" strategy.

Some in the community are worried: will APRO be "reverse assimilated" by traditional financial institutions? After all, YZi Labs is backed by Binance, and Franklin Templeton is also a traditional asset management company. What if they require APRO to make some "centralized" compromises?

My view is: this risk certainly exists, but APRO's response strategy is "technological neutrality". Its data validation capability can serve both decentralized DeFi protocols and traditional institutions' private chains. The key is that APRO meets the data needs of both markets, thus gaining bargaining power - traditional institutions wanting to use APRO's services must accept its technical standards (for example, data must be on the public chain, and the verification process must be auditable).

This ability to "force compliance" is precisely the greatest value of blockchain to traditional finance. It does not seek to overturn them, but rather uses technological advantages to make them actively adapt to on-chain rules.

From the timeline perspective, APRO's RWA layout is accelerating. In 2024, it will receive investments from YZi Labs and Franklin Templeton, in 2025, it will launch Oracle 3.0 and AI data validation, and in 2026, it plans to introduce TEE privacy computing (designed specifically for sensitive RWA data). This rhythm coincides perfectly with the global window period for gradually clarifying RWA regulations - the US SEC is formulating tokenized securities rules, the EU MiCA framework will take effect in 2024, and Hong Kong and Singapore are also actively promoting it.

By 2026-2027, when RWA truly becomes mainstream, those traditional institutions that are still observing will find that APRO has already become the "de facto standard". By then, it will no longer be a "Trojan horse", but rather a "city gate key" - wanting to enter the on-chain RWA market, one cannot bypass APRO's data validation.