While the secondary market in the crypto space is still arguing over the rise and fall of meme coins, smart money in the primary market has already started to position itself for the next cycle's infrastructure. Recently, while reviewing investment data, a project called APRO Oracle caught my attention.
What interests me is not how much money it has raised again (although $3 million in seed funding is not insignificant in this market), but rather its list of investors: Polychain Capital, ABCDE, and most surprisingly — Franklin Templeton.
Who is Franklin Templeton? They are a traditional financial giant managing $15 trillion in assets and one of the institutions approved to issue Bitcoin ETFs. They rarely invest directly in early-stage crypto infrastructure unless they see some inevitable trend.
So, what are they betting on? My judgment is: they are betting on the intersection of 'Bitcoin DeFi' and 'RWA'.
Let's first talk about Bitcoin. For a long time, Bitcoin has been like an isolated island. It has the strongest security, but it 'cannot see' the outside world. Ethereum has Chainlink, and therefore Ethereum has DeFi. However, on the Bitcoin network, due to the limitations of the UTXO model and scripting language, safely feeding external data (like prices and transaction results) to Bitcoin is very difficult.
The current Bitcoin ecosystem (Layer 2, Ordinals, runes) is exploding; it's like building skyscrapers in the desert without laying down water pipes. What APRO Oracle does is this 'laying water pipes' task. It claims to be 'the oracle of the Bitcoin ecosystem,' which is clever because it hits a huge vacuum area. The current market pain point is that when you engage in lending on Bitcoin L2, it is still very difficult to obtain a price for a Bitcoin mainnet native asset that is both fast and accurate. APRO leverages its 'Oracle 3.0' architecture, specifically tailored to the characteristics of Bitcoin (such as the Lightning Network and RGB++ protocol). This is why top Asian capital like ABCDE is investing in it, as Asia is the main battlefield for the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Let's look at Franklin Templeton's logic. They focus on RWA (real-world assets). Moving U.S. Treasury bonds and stocks onto the chain, the biggest challenge is not issuing tokens, but 'verification.' Traditional oracles (Oracle 2.0) can only transmit price data, like 'the current gold price is 2000 dollars.' However, the data needed for RWA is complex: for instance, 'Is the property deed for this land real?' and 'Has the audit report for this batch of goods passed?'
This brings us to the biggest technical highlight of APRO: it is not just a machine for transmitting prices; it introduces AI.
While reading the white paper, I found that APRO is actually making a very bold attempt: using off-chain AI computing to process unstructured data (such as PDF documents and satellite images), and then using on-chain verification to legitimize the results. This means that future smart contracts can 'understand' audit reports. This is a critical need for institutions that want to move traditional financial assets onto the chain.
So, back to the initial question. Why are these top institutions investing? Because they realize that if Bitcoin is to transform from 'digital gold' to a 'financial operating system,' and if RWA is to transition from concept to a multi-trillion market, there must be middleware that can handle complex information while being compatible with the characteristics of Bitcoin.
In the current oracle market, Chainlink occupies half of the EVM landscape, while Pyth has captured the high-frequency trading market. APRO did not choose to confront directly but instead entered the two unmonopolized vertical fields of 'Bitcoin native' + 'AI verification.'
The moat of the oracle track is extremely deep, with very strong network effects. But from the perspective of capital betting logic, the problem APRO is solving is indeed a threshold that the industry must cross next. For us retail investors, watching where the money from these institutions flows is often more useful than watching K-line charts.
