It isn’t.
The real nightmare has always been something more basic: deciding what a JPEG is worth at the exact moment a smart contract has to choose between “you’re safe” and “you’re getting liquidated.”
At first our app was simple. You could deposit a blue-chip NFT, borrow against it in stablecoins, and either pay back or get liquidated if the floor dropped too much. We launched during a hype cycle. Volumes were high, collections were buzzing, and honestly, everyone was a bit drunk on numbers going up.
Our first valuation model was… let’s call it optimistic.
We pulled floor prices from one major marketplace API. If that endpoint said “this collection floor is 10 ETH,” we believed it. We applied some safety buffers, set LTVs, and off we went. For a while, it looked fine. Loans opened, interest accumulated, treasury grew.
Then we had our first serious “this feels wrong” moment.
A borrower came into our support channel furious. According to them, their NFT should never have been liquidated. They linked three different marketplaces where similar items were listed well above the floor we used. They showed private offers they’d received. They pointed out that the dump which triggered liquidation happened on a thin venue where someone offloaded a couple of distressed pieces way below what other buyers were actually willing to pay.
From our logs, the story was simple: our oracle saw “floor down,” health factor fell, liquidation bot did its job. From their perspective, it looked like they got rugged by a glitch in the valuation layer.
Technically, our contracts behaved as written. Emotionally, I had a hard time disagreeing with them.
That incident forced us to admit we’d oversimplified something that was never simple to begin with. NFT “price” isn’t a single number. It’s a mess of: where trades happen, how deep liquidity is, the difference between floor and mid-tier pieces, even whether a trait is trending.
We tried to fix it ourselves at first.
We added more data sources, started pulling floor and recent sales from multiple marketplaces, and layered a bit of logic on top: ignore obvious outliers, focus on trades with decent size, weight more recent activity. Our diagrams got more complicated. So did our failure modes.
Every extra rule created new edge cases. One marketplace would go down, another would list wash trades that our filters missed, someone would dump a rare at near-floor and confuse our trait logic. We were spending more time debating “what’s the right way to compute floor” than improving the actual product.
There was a day when one of our engineers drew a big box on a whiteboard, labelled it “valuation engine,” surrounded it with arrows from five marketplaces, two indexers and our own DB, then turned to me and said, “We’re pretending this is one thing. It’s not. And we’re not the best people to be running it.”
That’s the day APRO stopped being background noise and became a serious option.
I’d known about it in the general “oh, another oracle network” sense. This time I approached it differently. Not as a trader, not as someone hunting a new token, but as a founder who was tired of being the accidental source of truth for data we could barely control.
I needed two things:
A way to combine multiple NFT market signals into a single, sane view our contracts could actually use.
A reason to believe the people keeping that view up to date would still care when the hype cooled down.
APRO answered the first part in a way that felt unusually honest. It doesn’t pretend that one marketplace or one feed tells the whole story. It’s built to ingest data from many places, compare them, and publish something that’s already been through a round of “does this actually make sense?”
For NFTs, that means combining floor listings, recent sales, collection-wide activity, and even trait-specific information into usable signals. Instead of us juggling half a dozen APIs, we could plug into feeds that already did that heavy lifting.
We started with one collection. Our most active one. For those loans, we stopped reading our own hacked-together “fair floor” and started reading APRO’s view. The rest of the system stayed the same.
The difference didn’t show up on good days. It showed up on weird days.
On a thin Sunday, a couple of collectors panic-listed below the last week’s range. One marketplace reacted quickly, floors dropped there. Others lagged. Under our old system, that one venue would have yanked our “oracle floor” down enough to flirt with liquidation thresholds. Under the APRO-backed system, the feed moved, but not nearly as dramatically. It saw the cheap listings, but it also saw that there wasn’t real follow-through across the rest of the market yet.
We ended up with a lower, but still sane, value. No cascade of technical liquidations on what turned out to be a brief pocket of fear.
That felt a lot closer to “market risk” and a lot less like “data roulette.”
The second part of my worry – whether this would hold over time – is where AT came into the story for me.
I don’t like trusting black boxes. In our business, you can’t say “we rely on XYZ” without eventually somebody asking, “Why should we trust XYZ more than your old setup?” That’s a fair question.
With APRO, the meaningful answer lives in incentives. The people and systems running this network don’t just spin up a node and call it a day. They tie themselves to the system with AT. They stake it to participate, earn it when they deliver good information, and risk losing it if they feed in junk or vanish at crucial moments.
That doesn’t make them saints, but it does turn “please be accurate” into something more tangible: “being sloppy costs you money.”
We decided we didn’t want to just be a customer at arm’s length. If our lending protocol was going to hinge on APRO’s NFT valuations, we wanted some exposure to the same token that binds the network together. So we carved out a small slice of our treasury into AT and treated it like infrastructure, not a trade.
That one move changed how we behaved.
When APRO shipped improvements to NFT-related feeds – better handling of trait floors, smarter wash-trade detection, cross-market orderbook awareness – we didn’t just note it as interesting news. We tested it, adjusted our internal risk buffers, and in a couple of cases loosened overly conservative limits we’d put in place to compensate for our old unreliable data.
When the conversation turned to governance and long-term incentives for AT, we actually engaged. It wasn’t abstract tokenomics; it was the future reliability of the valuations our users bet their loans on.
Over the next few months, we rolled APRO out to more collections.
We made one important design choice at the same time: we decided to show users more of how we think about value.
In the app, next to “current collection value” and “liquidation threshold,” we added small explainer lines: your risk is calculated using a blended view of floor, sales and liquidity, not a single listing. That copy exists because APRO exists. Before, we didn’t have the courage to say that. It wasn’t true.
The arguments in our Discord changed too.
We still get heated debates about whether some grail is “worth more” than the collection stats suggest. But we don’t get as many complaints that the system reacted to a price that “nobody in the real market believes.” When we dispute something, we can point to a coherent view a whole network has converged on, not just an API call that happened at a bad time.
I’m not naïve. NFT markets are still wild. Collections can die. Liquidity can disappear. No oracle network, however sophisticated, can protect against a project truly losing community interest.
But there’s a huge difference between “you got liquidated because the market actually moved against you over days” and “you got liquidated because one odd trade on one quiet marketplace temporarily reset our idea of the floor.”
APRO doesn’t solve the first problem. Nothing should. That’s risk. It does a good job of reducing the second problem. That’s noise. That distinction matters to me.
If you asked me what APRO is, in one sentence, from my vantage point, I’d say: it’s the thing that lets me stop being secretly terrified that my protocol’s idea of “price” is out of sync with the world.
And if you asked me what AT is, I’d say: it’s what convinces me that the people maintaining that alignment aren’t going to vanish when the next shiny meta appears. They’ve put something on the line. So have we.
Our users don’t log in and think, “Ah yes, APRO valuations with AT-secured incentives, wonderful.” They log in and think, “Can I borrow against this NFT without waking up to a liquidation that makes no sense?”
If, more often than not, the answer feels like “yes,” then somewhere in the background, that’s APRO doing exactly the unglamorous job we hired it for.
