25% of the token supply, which is 250 million AT, is allocated for an ecological fund. This isn't unusual in the crypto world, but most project ecological funds are just small vaults used for market value management. On the surface, they claim to support developers, but in reality, it's just for pump and dump. When the bear market comes, if the fund hasn't been spent, the project is finished.
@APRO-Oracle's approach to the ecological fund is completely different. It's not about spreading it thinly; it's about targeted explosions. The goal is very clear: to use this 250 million AT to create breakthroughs in the RWA and AI Agent sectors.
The biggest problem with RWA now is not a lack of demand but rather the high costs. A project looking to tokenize real estate faces compliance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars just to hire lawyers to research laws, auditors to verify assets, and tech teams to develop contracts. By the time all this is done, half the funding may be burned before actual operations even begin.
What can APRO's ecological fund do here? Reduce cold start costs. How to reduce? If an RWA project wants to use APRO's AI nodes to verify audit reports and monitor reserve ratios, this service might cost several thousand dollars per month at market prices. However, if the project meets APRO's ecological partnership standards, such as achieving a certain TVL and exceeding user thresholds, the ecological fund will subsidize the service fee for the first six months, allowing the project to use APRO for free using the fund to pay the node operators.
What about after six months? If the project starts running and making a profit, it will naturally continue to pay for APRO's services because it is already deeply integrated, and switching costs are high. If the project fails, APRO only loses a few tens of thousands of dollars, so the subsidy risk is controllable.
This strategy of offering free services before charging is very common in the SaaS industry, but in the Web3 oracle space, APRO may be the first to do this. Chainlink never offers free trials; you must pay with LINK tokens before using its services. However, APRO dares to do this because it has a 25% ecological fund backing it.
From existing cooperation cases, this strategy is proving effective. The RWA dedicated chain APRO of Plume Network is its core data service provider. Projects on Plume, such as tokenized government bonds and real estate funds, are using APRO's AI verification capabilities. These projects may have received ecological fund subsidies in the early stages, but once they scale up, they become long-term paying customers of APRO.
The AI Agent track is still in its early demand cultivation period, but the potential is huge. In 2026, APRO plans to launch the Agent Broadcast Layer, which is essentially an AI Agent data stream platform. AI programs can subscribe to specific topics such as DeFi arbitrage opportunities, news sentiment changes, and large on-chain transfers, receiving multi-modal data streams in real time.
But the question arises: Why should AI Agent developers use APRO instead of grabbing data themselves? Because of the cost. If an AI Agent has to monitor the liquidity of 50 DEXs, analyze 100 news websites, and track 1,000 on-chain addresses, the monthly API call and server costs could easily exceed tens of thousands of dollars. However, if they use APRO's Broadcast Layer to subscribe to a DeFi arbitrage channel, it may only cost a few hundred dollars a month.
The role of the ecological fund here is to subsidize early developers. APRO can launch the AI Builder Grant, and outstanding AI Agent projects can apply for funding support. The funding includes free data stream subscriptions for the first three months and GPU computing power subsidies if they need to run AI models, along with technical support from the APRO team for optimization.
In exchange, these AI Agent projects must open-source part of their code and share their usage data to become APRO case studies. When the AI Agent economy truly explodes, possibly between 2026 and 2027, these early supported projects will be APRO's seed users. They will promote APRO services voluntarily because their businesses are built on APRO's data streams.
Some community members question whether releasing 5% of the 25% fund at TGE, which is 12.5 million AT, with the remaining 48 months of linear release at 4.94 million AT per month, will be too slow and miss market opportunities.
My view is quite the opposite. Slow is right. What would happen if APRO released 25% all at once at TGE? The project team, holding a few hundred million dollars worth of AT, could easily become impulsive. Today they subsidize this project with one million, and tomorrow they sponsor that event with five hundred thousand; the money would be spent quickly, but the results might not be good.
A 48-month linear release means APRO only has 4.94 million AT to spend each month, which is about 670,000 dollars at the current circulation price. This amount is not much, forcing the team to be frugal. Every subsidy and every collaboration must be carefully assessed for ROI (return on investment).
Moreover, the 48-month long cycle gives APRO enough time to adjust its strategy. Suppose the RWA market does not take off in 2025, but the AI Agent explodes; APRO can tilt more funds toward AI. Conversely, if AI Agents do not perform, APRO can adjust funding back to RWA. This kind of flexibility cannot be achieved through a one-time release.
Based on existing fund usage, APRO's strategy is to deeply bind large projects while casting a wide net for small projects. For large projects like Lista DAO and Plume Network, APRO is willing to invest heavily. It not only subsidizes service fees but may also directly use AT to exchange for the other party's tokens to establish a community of interests, co-develop customized functions, and jointly hold events. If these large projects succeed, APRO's brand value will grow exponentially.
Small projects cast a wide net through hackathons and Builder Grants to incentivize the community and attract a large number of long-tail developers. Although each small project receives limited subsidies, ranging from a few thousand to tens of thousands of AT, accumulating small amounts can quickly expand the APRO developer ecosystem. Moreover, there may be hidden future unicorns among these small projects, just like how Ethereum early funded Uniswap, Aave, and other later DeFi giants.
Another often overlooked point is that the ecological fund not only spends money but can also make money. How to earn? Through investment returns. Suppose APRO invests in an early RWA project using AT to obtain 5% equity or tokens from the other party. If this project appreciates 10 times in valuation a few years later, APRO's fund investment will also appreciate 10 times.
This is equivalent to APRO treating the ecological fund as a Web3 venture capital fund. It is not just about burning money for subsidies, but rather a strategic investment. The AT invested may flow back at a higher value in the future, whether through project buybacks after success or token appreciation.
In the long run, the greatest value of the ecological fund is not how much money was spent but how many dependencies were established. Every project that accepts APRO fund subsidies will deeply integrate APRO's data services. Over time, this creates path dependence; switching to other oracles becomes too costly as it requires rewriting contracts, retesting, and re-optimizing. It’s better to continue using APRO.
This dependence is the real moat. Why can Chainlink maintain its leading position as an oracle? It’s not because of how advanced the technology is; many new oracles have better technology. It is because early integrated projects like Aave, Compound, and Synthetix have already developed deep dependencies on Chainlink, making switching costs too high.
APRO's 25% ecological fund is replicating this path, but it is choosing the battlefield of RWA and AI Agents rather than traditional DeFi. Those who are still mocking APRO for distributing 25% of the fund may not understand the game. By 2027, when the RWA market scale exceeds 100 billion dollars, and AI Agents become mainstream applications in Web3, you will find that those projects that received APRO fund subsidies have grown into leaders in their respective tracks, all relying on APRO's data services.
