LBank AMA Recap with Apron Network
Q1: Could you give us some brief information about Apron Network?
Apron Network is a relatively recent project. Our story begins in 2020. At the time our tech team was working on another blockchain project. There was a significant incidents happened in 2020 where Binance, Metamask, Coinbase, and a lot of the other networks all went down at the same times for a period of 2 hours. The project we are teamwork working on was affected as well. The cause of this event is because the node service provider, these companies relied on, Infura, failed to update their Ethereum node on time.
So after this happened, our team started rethinking. How can we do to avoid this? Is there anything that we can do different to prevent this from happening? This is where Apron comes in. Apron is a decentralized infrastructure service network that provides service to developers, application users and infrastructure operators. We provide service such as a node services on-chain data indexing service, quotation service and Apron is developed by Substrate and could be operated as a parachain of Polkadot and Kusama. In the future, we do planning to connect to multiple public chains, providing different services to developers with low-cost. As of now, we have been listed on Huobi. And as we’re speaking today, we are officially listing on Gate.io and like many other Polkadot projects we are currently in the preparation for the slot auction.
Q2: As you mentioned in the previous, Apron Network will provide infrastructure services such as node services, on-chain data indexes, and quotation for Kusama, Polkadot, and Heco ecosystem. So is there any condition for the developer to become a node? and What interest will they get?
We have already began to provide service on Heco Chain, which will adopt the technical architecture of Apron Network. As we all know, Defi projects on Heco is developing rapidly, really captures the market’s attention, but they are lacking in infrastructure service. Our product on Heco well 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. To become an Apron service node, you only need to use Apron SDK and deploy it to your own server. This way, you can quickly get access and become node service provider with us. As a service provider, you can get two parts of income, one is the paid income from users using your service and the second is the mining revenue rewarded by us.
Q3: Are there any other competitors so far for the concept with the purpose of Infura? What are the advantages for Apron Network compare to competitors?
Service providers on Apron Network will likely to face a competitors such as Infura, The Graph, API3 and other products in the subdivision service area. Currently, products on the market only offers centralized service, and the service mostly focuses on its own subdivision, which there is really no general technical solution to link all of these subdivisions together. Essentially, that just means that to have not been a project that is truly decentralized, which is a good news for us. It means that we don’t have any direct competitors.
Q4: Can you tell us, Why does the blockchain ecosystem need a truly decentralized infrastructure services platform like the Apron network?
Like every project will need node services and currently most projects rely on centralized service like infura because it’s just too costly and time consuming for a single project must especially for the smaller projects to maintain their own nodes. Like I said, events have happened where the service provided fell to update or other instances which costs all these other projects using their service 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 means they have their own server and provide our customers with the choice of working with all of them at the same time. Even when one of the providers goes down, our users won’t really be affected because there is still other providers working for them. So basically, Apron ,compared to other services, will be much safer, cheaper, and more convenient for centralized node service providers. We are really trying to adopt within or without the crypto space. Just we really want to create a truly decentralized service provider.
Q5 You’re saying that the cost-effectiveness is one of Apron’s main features. I wanna know how much would developers save approximately by using your platform compared to other projects on the market? How do you manager to reduce the costs of using your platform?
For example, if you want to develop a Uniswap or an insurance project, you need to retrieve the off-chain data and the asset Information of the user accounts. If you want to develop on ethereum and you will need to build a node and the node needs to query the corresponding data, compared to other new projects prone, essentially combine everyone who has the ability was a capability to set up their own nodes. And developer will be able to choose whoever they want to work with. And the, most amazing part is that they can use several ones at the same time. As the volume increases, are algorithm will balance out eventually throughout the service providers, which will remain us or we will be able to maintain a stable and cost-effective ecosystem.
Q6 I want to know how Apron network provides extra responsible security as compared to other systems. Can you please clarify in simple terms? A lot of people here are not from technical backgrounds. If you explain that in simple terms, they will have more ordinary folks uh like us to be cheered into your projects.
Yes, definitely. So in terms of security, just to give you one example, we offer encryption service to all the service provided by service providers. So that when someone is trying to attack our customers or users by hacking into their server, they won’t even know where to go because we have so many service providers, and there won’t be any links of who is providing the service to whom.
Q7 Can you share some information about the tokenomics of APN?
The economic model of Apron network is really similar to chainlink. Apn is our native token, which will be used for actual payments with business application scenarios. When users use our service, we will charge your service fee, which will be locked or destroyed, so Apn has a deflationary model. We also have two staking portals, which will lock most of our token into to increase the chance of user to earn income from staking. We are aiming to be like a multi chain network to be able to provide service on other as well. But apn will be our only token, and the users of apn will be more diverse as we progress.
Q8 I see that Apron Network help developers to build Dapps using your platform so may I know about Apron Network business model? Where did you produce income for maintain your project? Do you charge developer when they use your platform?
There are many roles that will be involved in Apron network, such as the provider which are the infrastructure service providers. They will provide its capability such as Ethereum rpc service, Polkadot rpc service, Oracle service, privacy, protection services. We have the miners which are the node miners, which they will obtain rewards by providing and running nodes. We also have the consumer which develop Dapps and Defi and just our developers in general. They will pay apn tokens required by the service to infrastructure service providers.
We also have the inspector which will be rewarded by supervision and inspect the operation of the service on our network. We also have our last role which is the delegator by providing apn token to the miners and providers for stacking and receiving apn tokens and a portion of the service fee. Apn takes effective of a service settlement and stimulates in the Apron network participates. Participants really pay apn to use infrastructure service and obtain apn by providing resources and construction, thereby forming really a close ecosystem.
Q9 So how will the demand of your token increase in the future? What should you do to Increase token demands?
The demand of our token really to exist since in order to use our service, you will need to pay in apn with the increase of users, in order to facilitate the payment of the users. We just recently introduced xapn which is a service payment stable coin, created by stacking apn most of the time market price are fluctuating, so we are launching xapn that could be expected to enable the APP developers and users on Apron to continue use xapn to pay for the service usage. But with the relatively stable price, the service payment you’re paying won’t be are really affected by the market.
Q10 Great. And we knew that marketing is a central element to other project, so that everyone knows the potential that the project can bring is vital to achieving the goals set. What is your strategy for attracting new users and investors to your platform and keeping them in long term?
We do have like amazing community who really help us through our development. And we continue to focus on expanding our partnerships with other projects and just enhancing our community activity as a whole. We really want to focus on bringing our community closer. We do plan to host a series of campaigns and events to engage our community members. We focus on operating 3 types of communities. The first is developer community. The second is service provider community, then third is token holder and investor community. We are constantly hearing new ideas and developing and testing new products. We just want to overall increase our service quality providing the best for our users.
Q11. As far as I know Apron will contribute to the Kusama slot auction. What is Apron’s strategy on Kusama slot auction? Can you explain the process of doing this?
Apron Network will join the Kusama slot auction cuz as a part of Polkadot, we wanna to provide services for the Polkadot ecosystem as early as possible. And as we all might know, Statemine, the first featureful parachain on Kusama has already been worked smoothly on June 4th. Kusama’s parachain functionality is now available. we are expecting parachain launch trail for all projects who wanna participate in a few days.
Q12. What are your strategies for IPO?
We will launch a testnet named Kpron which is the network that Apron deployed on Kusama and we will issue KPN on Kpron Network as a portion of the tokens allocated by Apron Network . Kpron can be swapped with APN at a 1:1 rate (1KPN=1APN). This will not change on Apron’s tokenomics, and the total amount of APN remains the same.
Q13. Sounds great. What are your parents as for the timeline of the auction?
As we know, the Kusama slot leasing period is divided into 8 periods of 6 weeks each, 48 weeks in total. we are palnning to participate in the Kusama parachain slot auction starting from the 3rd slot.Our aims is o get a slot for testing as quickly as possible,Apron will first bid on the 1 lease period for 6 weeks the following bidding periods will be determined according to the actual test conditions.Participants who supporting of Apron’s slot auction on Kusama network will reward with a fixed return of tokens for 6 weeks. The rewards mechanism will be in accordance with the units of KSM contirbution, basically we will take 8% of total units of APN into the Kusama and Polkadot parachain slot auction as rewards.
When Kpron wins a slot and successfully runs a parachain, contributors will directly receive a 35% of corresponding rewards, 35% on the second month, and 30% on the third month.
Q14. What do we as investors have to do to participate？
Apron chose to crowdfund our slot lease using Kusama’s built-in crowdloan mechanism, which allows people to contribute by agreeing to lock up their own KSM until the end of the lease.Campaign Index, it is the way to join from the local crowdloan, I think the Kusama will publish the guideline that leads how that goes Another thing is We might cooperate with some top-tier exchanges or wallets to add channels for participation as well.
Q15. Could you tell us about the short-term and long-term goals of Apron in the future?
Sure, after launching Apron on Huobi, we’re working on the Kusama Slot Auction, meanwhile, we are preparing on Apron’s testnet. At this time we were recruiting node services and other infrastructure providers. As you might see in our roadmap, 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. From the perspective of the traditional software and information industry, Apron Network is a form of middleware service. we hope Apron can be seen as an example of putting middleware theory into practice, we can provide services like SaaS/PaaS in Amazon, a kind of platform that provides communication between blockchain and application software. That’s our long-term goal.
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