Imagine the crypto market as an endless city that never sleeps. The role of a leading exchange is to provide a glamorous trading hall and a chip system, while data oracle protocols (like APRO and other underlying services) are the fundamental laws that govern the city's operation—determining how prices are set and assets are settled.

By the end of 2025, an interesting phenomenon has emerged: over the past decade, everyone has been obsessively chasing platform tokens of exchanges, believing they are the best way to monetize traffic. But after the full explosion of Bitcoin's layer 2 ecosystem and modular infrastructure this year, the underlying logic of the market has been completely rewritten. Exchanges capture market "volatility," while protocols like APRO capture "certainty"—which is the true scarce resource.

From a technical perspective, an exchange is essentially a black box matching engine. Even the strongest liquidity cannot escape the framework constraint of "user count × trading frequency." When a bear market hits or regulations tighten, the exchange's ability to extract value quickly declines. But the logic of APRO is entirely different—it directly connects to every capillary of DeFi. In the era of modularity, operations like cross-chain asset anchoring, staking and lending liquidation, and synthetic asset pricing all rely on oracle protocols like APRO to provide accurate data support. This deeply embedded value capture capability far surpasses the competitiveness of traditional exchanges.