I used to joke that my startup’s biggest risk wasn’t crypto, it was Excel.
We help small exporters get paid faster by tokenising their invoices. In simple terms: a business issues an invoice, we represent it on-chain, liquidity providers fund it, and the business gets money up front while investors earn a fee when the buyer finally pays.
It’s a neat idea. The ugly part is everything that has to be true in the background:
Did the buyer actually pay
On what date
In what currency
What was the FX rate that day
What’s the remaining exposure
For the first few deals, we tracked all of that with a mix of bank APIs, email confirmations and, yes, spreadsheets. It felt “startup scrappy” until we nearly paid out early on an invoice that hadn’t settled yet, because someone misread a statement and our internal “status” flipped too soon.
That scared me more than any on-chain bug.
If our contracts release funds on the wrong signal, it doesn’t matter how clean the Solidity is. We’ve still broken trust.
APRO came into the picture when we finally admitted we needed a grown-up way to tell our contracts what had happened in the real world.
Instead of having a human flip flags, we started routing events through a flow where external data gets checked, combined and turned into a clear signal before the chain reacts. Bank settlement, FX rate, timestamp – all of that passes through APRO-style logic before an invoice NFT is marked as paid and investors get their return.
The difference is subtle but huge.
Before, I felt like I was personally responsible for every “paid” status. Now I feel like there’s a proper bridge between our off-chain mess and our on-chain commitments. The smart contracts still do the final move, but the decision about “has this really happened” isn’t a guess in a spreadsheet anymore.
And that’s the kind of shift you need if you want real-world businesses to trust that this isn’t just another fragile DeFi experiment.