On 26/03, Apron Network joined PolkaWarriors for the AMA with our community. Apron Network revealed many special things about their project, roadmap update and answered questions from the community about Web3.0 infrastructure services that they are building on the Polkadot ecosystem.
Apron Network is a platform that provides infrastructure services for DApps developers, DApps users and node operators. It is the environment for DApps developers and users in general and infrastructure providers in specific.
This AMA was held on Telegram channel of PolkaWarriors with the participation of Philex Zhang- CEO of Apron Network. Many interesting questions about products of Apron Network, Roadmap of project and plan for project’s future were asked. Below is the recap of this AMA.
Philex Zhang, CEO of Apron Network. Philex graduated from National Computer Information Content Security Key laboratory of Harbin institute of technology as a PHD student in 2012. He worked in Feitian Safe Ltd as the senior system security analyst for 3 years before moving to New Zealand and working as a networking engineer. Philex Zhang followed the growth of cryptocurrency since its birth.
Below is a summary of the outstanding questions and answers from the AMA session.
1. What is your background and how did you come to the idea to create the Apron project? Why did you choose the name Apron?
Philex Zhang:
I think I have introduced myself previously so I won't repeat that. Regarding the idea, do you guys remember around the end of last year there was this huge incident where Binance, Metamask, Coinbase all went down 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 Quicknode can't balance the overload in time. A small mistake in a centralized service provider can potentially cause a catastrophe.So we need node services that won’t just go down when someone in the system made a mistake. That's where Apron comes.
Apron Network is committed to building a decentralized infrastructure service network platform to provide developers, application users and infrastructure operators with multiple services, including but not limited to node services, on-chain data indexing service, random numbers and quotation service. It is developed by Substrate and can be a parachain on Kuamsa.
Apron has a meaning: the parking area for airplane haha, which allows all types of infrastructure service providers and developers to "land" in our parking platform, and that is perfectly matching our understanding and expectation of Apron.
2. What technology or features of your platform allow you to achieve this amazing accessibility?
Philex Zhang:
Apron Pillar Node is developed using the Substrate framework to provide security guarantees for the Apron Network and ensure the stable operation of the network. It is the basic network node that constitutes the Apron Network. Apron Pillar Node will be started by Apron Labs initially, and will be run by participants in the community in the future.
Apron Node is the constituent node of the Apron Network. It uses the Substrate framework for development and has OCW (off-chain worker) features enabled. The basic service provider realizes the public provision of services through the Apron Node. The Apron Node synchronizes the basic service on the chain, and realizes the on-chain synchronization of service usage and billing information through the OCW module.
Apron Service Marketplace matches the services provided by infrastructure service providers with the needs of DApp developers. Infrastructure service providers implement the on-chain of infrastructure services through one-click deployment of Apron Node. Apron Node will provide infrastructure services to the Apron Market smart contract through OCW and synchronize infrastructure service usage data to the smart contract. The service usage is billed by the Apron Market smart contract.
Through Apron SDK, we help more node operators to become service providers with node service capabilities, and API service interfaces can be quickly generated through Apron sdk. At the same time, they don't need to maintain the API interface, and for many dnode operators, there is no need to spend extra time for maintenance. Apron helps them complete all the work. In addition, Apron will also acquire many developer users who do not need to be acquired by the service provider themselves, and can help the service provider obtain new benefits.In addition, the Apron network will also have a set of decentralized node service solutions. We use multiple service providers to serve together. Through the encryption matching algorithm, multiple service providers can provide services to users together, which can achieve decentralization.
The project is still under development. Because the Polkadot slot has not yet been auctioned, the parachain is temporarily unable to run, and the RPC service on heco and BSC smart chain have only begun to be used.
3. Apron tries to solve the problems by combining all the node runners with their own server and bringing choice for the customers to work with all of them, how many projects are now working under apron and how will customers choose to work when node is failed to update on time?
Philex Zhang:
With Apron Network essentially 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.
For node service providers on the other hand, we provide them with a full SDK(software development kit) so that they can easily set up their node and connect with Apron Network then become a node service provider
So far we partner with Phala, Bifrost, ChainX, DEGO, MATH, Kylin, Litentry more than 14+ projects, and there are more to come, every project we can provide infrastructure service and rapid generation of API interface.
4. From I see that Apron Network helps developers to build Dapps using your platform so may I know about Apron Network business model? Where did you produce income to maintain your project? Do you charge developers when they use your platform?
Philex Zhang:
In order to save time I’ll just put a simple version of APN utility here: APN is our native token and it has several utilities on Apron Network The tokenomic of us is similar to ChainLink's:
-
it’s used as payment to use service paid by the customer to the service provider.
-
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.
-
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 option. 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.
-
DAO governance: If there is any service provider has did bad behaviour or any
-
If the service provider breaks the rules or conflicts with the service users, we will hand over the decision to DAO Community and make the decision by voting. and only through holding APN can you participate in community governance of the network, in doing so obtaining a portion of the reward according to the proportion of pledge through voting.
Also the service providers will need to stake some APN token as their skin in the game so to say. And if bad behaviors occurred on the service provider side, they will lose the token they staked and the network will redistribute them to the inspectors.
5. From Which market are you focusing on? How do you rate the Vietnam market? Do you have any plans to develop in the Vietnam market?
Philex Zhang:
We have great followers from Vietnam, Turkey, Japanese, Korea, Russia, China and North America and Europe. That's based on the Polkadot statistic since we did some research among the eco. We have gathered a strong group of early supporters from these regions who plan to contribute to the long-term success of Apron Network. With the development of Apron Platform and more chain integration, we’ll continue expanding our network into different ecosystems this year. we will gradually put more focus on worldwide since the Crypto currency is global.
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 resources from Statista haha), so it’s safe to say the development in Vietnam is always a significant region requiring our utmost attention.
We will gather a strong group of early supporters from Vietnam who plan to contribute to the long-term success of Apron Network. We will continue to focus on exploring the strategic partner and enhancing the community activity.
In the direction of bringing the 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!
In the live questions sections, Justin did answer several short questions from the Polka Warriors community.
1. What are the advantages of Apron Network and other projects? What steps will Apron Network take to stay on track?
Philex Zhang:
Service providers on Apron Network will likely face competitors such as Infura,The Graph, API3 and other products in the subdivision service area. Currently products on the market only offers centralized services, and these services mostly focuses on it’s own subdivision, which there is no general technical solution to link these subdivision, essentially means there have been a project that is truly decentralized that’s good news for us it mean we don’t have any direct competitor
2. What problems is your project trying to solve to make it easier for Crypto users? Please let us know how evolving the roadmap is right now. What will happen this year and in the future?
Philex Zhang:
Every project needs node services. Currently most projects rely on centralized service like infura because it’s too costly and time consuming for any single projects to maintain their own nodes.Like i said events happened these service provided fails to update, and cause many projects went down at the same time. At Apron what we do is we combine the force of all individuals who are capable of running a node, that mean they have their own server, and provide our customers with a choice of working with all of them at the same time ,so even when some of these providers go down, our users won’t be affected since there are still many other providers working for them. Basically, Apron Network is a much safer, convenient alternative to centralized node service providers. we are envisioning an adoption within and without the crypto space of being truly a decentralized infrastructure provider in the near future
3. What are your top 3 things for priorities in 2021? Could you share some plans for the upcoming year?
Philex Zhang:
In my personal opinion, I think of 2021 as the beginning of Web3 and Polkadot network. We saw a variety of projects being released in the past few month. We have just received the grant from Web3 Foundation. We will continue to expand our network into different ecosystems. W are planning to provide node services for Ethereum and Polkadot in Q2 2021, that would be a milestone for our development from then on the adoption of other ecosystem would be much easier.
4. What plans does APRON NETWORK have for the crypto market? And what stage is the project in the market right now?
Philex Zhang:
We have already begun to provide services on Heco Chain, which will adopt the technical architecture of\ Apron network. As we all know our product on Heco will help us to establish a starter user base. You could think of it as the demo version of our future products, which is a very important first step.
5. Demand - which is important for investors. How will demand of Your token increase in the future? What should you do to increase token demand?
Philex Zhang:
The demand of our token exists, since in order to use our service you need to pay in APN. With the increase of users, in order to facilitate the payment of users, it is not ruled out that a stable coin might be a payment method even if stable coin payment opens in the future but paying in APN will always be cheaper.
