On March 21th 2021, our community had a chance to welcome Philex Zhang to join an AMA to give fruitful information about key features and the roadmap of of Apron Network - a decentralized infrastructure service platform for application developers, application users and infrastructure service operators.
This AMA was held by Maru Nguyen from CryptoFamily Group – top crypto trading community in Vietnam, where investors and traders can obtain the lastest news and signals from bot/ admins, as well as discuss and share investment experiences in the crypto space.
At this AMA, CEO of Apron warmly greeted the community and provided detailed information about the project and its key features, as well as some exciting news and hot events will be taking place in the near future.
Time: 9:00 PM (UTC + 7) on Sunday, March 21th, 2021
Venue: https://t.me/CryptoFamilyGroup
Airdrop 150 USDT for the best questions in the AMA.
PART I: OVERVIEW QUESTIONS
1. First, can you give me a brief introduction about your team and Apron Network? What are the occasions that lead you to the blockchain industry and this project?
Mr. Zhang: Sure. My name is Philex Zhang. I graduated from National Comupter Information Content Security Key Laboratory of harbin Institute of Technology as a PHD student in 2012, and worked in Feitian Safe Ltd for almost 3 years as a senior system security analyst after graduation. In 2015, I went abroad and studied computer network and security for 2 years in New Zealand, and since then worked as a networking engineer there. Cryptography is a key area of our information security research.
It's safe to say that I have been following the development of cryptocurrency since its birth.
And Apron Network is committed to building a decentralized infrastructure service network platform to provide developers, application users and infrastructure operators with a decentralized network based on blockchain technology infrastructure services. It is developed by Substrate and can be a parachain on Kuamsa.
Apron Network has completed the seed and private sound of funding, invested by CMS holdings, Monday Capital, Republic, AU21, Spark Digital Capital, PAKA, NGC Ventures, Digital Renaissance Foundation, DFG, Vega Ventures and Candaq.
At the same time, Apron Network has also obtained a grant from the Web3 Foundation and selected by the Substrate builder Program.
2. Next, please tell me what core values that Apron Network aims to bring to users.
Mr. Zhang: We want ot become the infrastructure service aggregator of the Web3 era. As you may know, all the DApp developers currently have to relay in centralized node service providers such as Infura. quite well known among even the newcomers in Cryptofield.
Because the nodes are essentiall waht connect DApps with the underlying blockchain and all the volume happens there.
With Apron Network essentitally we aggregate everyone who has the ability to set up their own nodes and the developers will be able to choose whoever they want to work with.
They can even choose to use several different node service providers at the same time, so that when let’s say one of the nodes goes down, their platform will simply just continue working on other nodes without any problem.
Apron is similar to the iass/aass/pass service provided by infrastructure platform such as AWS (Amzon Cloud Service)
It acted as middleware between infrastructure service providers and developers, to provide infrastructure service providers with rapid generation of API service interfaces, and provide services for DApp&DeFi developers to help their efficient development.
3. Where do you see Apron in a year from now? Share with us your plan to expand in the Vietnam market
Mr. Zhang: Besides the adoption of Polkadot ecosystem, Apron will be able to connect to multiple public chains such as Ethereum, BSC, Filecoin, and Helium, including Layer 2. Provide developers with low-cost multiple blockchain ecological infrastructure services in the forthcoming future.
Apron Network will provide node services, on-chain data indexing, quotation and other infrastructure services for the Kusama and Polkadot ecosystems.
Regarding to the Vietnam market, Vietnam especially has huge and high-quality Crypto followers since Vietnam has the second-highest rate of in terms of cryptocurrency use among 74 surveyed economies( got resource from Statista haha)
So it's safe to say the developement in Vietname always a significant region requiring our utmost attention. We will gather a strong group of early supporters from veitnam who plan to contribute to the long-term success of Apron Network.
In the direction of bringing the Vietnam community closer, Apron will host a series of campaigns and events to engage with community members, including AMA, writing contest, educational lecture series, pop quiz and much more to come. Please stay tuned with us!
PART 2: PRE-COLLECTED QUESTIONS FROM TWITTER
1. Could you please name some of your products and give the explanation on how they provide more secure, stable and rich functionality to DApp users @meadow_lake2
Mr. Zhang: For node service providers, we provide a full SDK(software development kits) so that they can easily set up their server with Apron Network.
Data indexing service is basically what Graph is doing. For example if you are being a developer, you wanna present TPR, total amount of users and real-time data flows on smart contracts. You will be using in on-chain data indexing service.
Random number service: for example, I may need to develop a NFT product like a blind box. The random number have to be extracted from the off-chain and it cannot be the default data given by the platform, because once its written in the smart contract, everyone can easily know what exactly is in the blind box. There will be random numbers provider A+B+C providing monitoring data, weather data, or some other network's data, plus their own algorithm to combine it into a new set of random numbers.
Quotation services are like DApp Insurance, which require real-time access to off-chain data. However, prices are different on different different platforms, so we will let users choose freely.
2. Partnership is an integral component of any project's journey. Which types of partnership that Apron Network has already attained and what are your plans on this front moving forward? @sonywed
Mr. Zhang: Oh speaking of parnets, we made a great progress recently: Phala, DEGO, Crust, IOST, Brifost, Darwinia, Stone, Math wallet, Bandot, Trustbase, etc.
We will continue to focus on exploring the strategic partner and there will be more to come.
3. In recent years, technologies around the layer 2 blockchain, solutions have developed dramatically. How does APRON fit into the boom of layer 2 networks? What makes it unique and different from all other platforms of this type? @Itachicvc
Mr. Zhang: Apron will support Layer2 architecture, and procides services on layer2 for developers and users as well. On the Apron Network, over-reliance on one particular service would be completely eliminated as the Apron Node can be accessed to provide node services through different service providers, let alone depending on one entity. The dApp developers would be able to directly use the service through Apron SDK implementation, eliminating any migration issues.
4. On your tokenomics section in your whitepaper you said that the service call will charge a certain gas fee and certain service usage fee, all of this of course will be done with APN, that is your native token, so, could you tell us more about APN token? @PhuLe26224707
Mr. Zhang: In order to save time I'll just put a simple version of our token utility here:
$APN is our native token and it has sereral utilities on Apron Network, The tokenomic of us is similar to ChainLink's.
1. It is used as payment to use service paid by the customer to the service provider.
2. Apron Network will charge a certain amount of fee as the service fee as well and this fee will be burnt permanently which makes APN a deflationary token.
This is very important because as we grow and more customers come to Apron Network, more tokens will be burnt which means the value of the APN you and I are holding will increase.
3. Staking. We have several portals for our token holders to stake their APN token earning passive income and helping the network grow at the same time.
For example, we have an "inspector pool" which is for those who want a less risky staking oprion. Their role in the Network will be simulating the real user to call the usage data, judge whether the service provider does a good job or not and whether they are providing fake data or not.
Also the service providers will need to stake some $APN token as their skin in the game so to say. And if there’s bad behaviors occurred on the service provider side, they will lose the token they staked and the network will redistribute them amount the inspectors.
5. I understand that Apron is a decentralized infrastructure service network, but is it really so necessary to limit the services that you provide? If so, what are the existing problems and limitations in the infrastructure used in the current Dapps? @Yamini500
Mr. Zhang: Do you guys remember around the end of last year there was a huge incident where Binance, Metamask, Coianbase all went done at the same time for around 2 hours?
This happened because Infura forgot to update their Ethereum node on time. And similar cases like Mask network ITO failed due to the quikNode can't balance the overlaod in time.
A small mistake in a centralized service provider can potentially cause a catastrophe.
Thats where Apron comes! We need node services that won't just go down when someone in the system made a mistake.
PART 3: LIVE QUESTIONS IN THE COMMUNITY
1. What are the important differences between Apron Pilla Node and Apron Node, and what is the role of each?
Mr. Zhang: It's a good quesiton that I never mentioned in here. Apron Pillar node is the basic computing node. It provide the secure and daily operation for the network.
Apron node basically constitutes by service providers. Its one of most important role of the Apron.
2. Tell us about your plans for 2021, what are you currently working on, and are you going to expand the list of big exchanges?
Mr. Zhang: Here is our roadmap for 2021:
We just completed our funding raising and from this ponit forward, we will shift our main focus towards the preparation for the Kusama slot auction and platform launch. The web3 open grants milestone will be delivered shortly. We’ve launched one of our POC version services for Heco testnet developers, following that, the rest of infrastructure service will be gradually launched in Q1 2021. Apron team is motivated to expedite our roadmap and delivered the scheduled launch of the testnet in April. All the essential utilities will be available to use for the Ethereum and the Polkadot ecosystem for free in Q2. With the continuous improvement of the network, Apron will dedicate itself to building a seamless infrastructure service platform on other public chains in Q3 and these developments will lead to the eventual launch of the Apron mainnet in Q4.
Defintely will be list on top-tier exchange coz Haha I like to say that “Apron Network has no competitors.”
3. Can you briefly explain how "Apron SDK" works? What is the role you play in the Apron Network?
Mr. Zhang: Another important one! Apron SDK is provided for dynamic balancing of applications to the Apron node, and encryption of data, Networks such as Mask, would only need to integrate the Apron SDK into their application and achieve appropriate load balancing.
4. Ambassadors play a very important role in every project, Do you have an ambassador program? If yes, how can I be one?
Mr. Zhang: Ambassador is the key, we accept all applications from world-wide, anyone with social media infleunce we welcome you all to join us!
5. APRON project looks good but it confuses me that there are so APRON other good Blockchain project. Why should I pay attention in Your project to give it the importance it deserves? What are your planning to achieve with your project?
Mr. Zhang:
Most hard tech problems have been solved and we already launched the demo verision of Apron Network on Huobi Heco ecosystem. If you are a developer on Heco feel free to sign up to use our services for free! And from now on our main focus will be on 2 parts:
1. Marketing and attracting more service providers and DApp developers to use Apron Network.
2. Expanding to other blockchains once all the testing has been done. We plan to first move onto Ethereum and Polkadot in Q2.
CF: Thank you so much for taking your time to join our AMA today. Seems like there're many things to learn about this quality project, but I'm afraid the time is up now.
For all of the questions that have not been answered yet, guys feel free to search for more information on the links provided below:
Social Media
TELEGRAM: https://t.me/ApronNetwork
TELEGRAM VIETNAM: https://t.me/ApronNetwork_Vn
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/apronofficial1
WEBSITE: http://apron.network/
DISCORD: https://discord.gg/Bu6HzJP2YY
GITHUB: https://github.com/apron-network
