AMA series: Apron x Tehmoonwalkers

Apron Network

8 min readFeb 27, 2021

Host:@Philex_Zhang Welcome my man, glad to have you here!

Philex Zhang: Glad to be here!

Philex Zhang: Wow I’m so excited to introduce Apron Network to all the amazing people of tehmoomwalkers!

Host: Well, without further ado, lets start

Philex Zhang: Yeah sure!

Host: And we’re excited to see what Apron is all about.

Host: Lets start with intro, be so kind and introduce yourself and your role in the project.

Philex Zhang: Definitely.

Philex Zhang: I’m Philex Zhang, the CEO of Apron Network. I graduated from National Computer Information Content Security Key laboratory of Harbin institute of technology as a PHD student in 2012, and worked in Feitian Safe Ltd as the senior system security analyst for 3 years before moving to New Zealand and work as a networking engineer.

Philex Zhang: Cryptography is a key area of our information security research and it’s safe to say that I have been following the development of cryptocurrency since its birth.

Host: Wow thats amazing.

Philex Zhang: We have 10 full time members working in Apron Network now 5 dev and 5 marketing people. All the developers have 3+ years of experience in crypto

Philex Zhang: Yes that’s about it!

Host: It’s safe to say that Apron will evolve and word will spread, amazing team and amazing intro.

Philex Zhang: Thanks man.

Host: Well lets dive in tech. What exatly is Apron and what does it solve?

Philex Zhang: Yes! That’s the part I’m mostly excited to share.

“The Apron Network is a decentralized platform created by Apron Labs to provide infrastructure services for dApp developers, dApp users, and operators in the blockchain world. In the initial stage we will provide node service, on-chain data indexing service, random numbers, price feed service and etc for Polkadot ecosystem, also we will provide Ethereum, BSC, Heco and much more public chain in the forthcoming future.”

Philex Zhang: Here’s a quote from our website

Philex Zhang: But I know it might be too technical for ordinary retail investors to grasp so please allow me to explain it a bit in a more layman term.

Host: take your time.

Philex Zhang: First of all we provide decentralized node services to DApp developers.

Philex Zhang: As you might know all the DApp developers currently have to rely on centralized node service providers such as infura because the nodes are essentially what connect DApps with the underlying blockchain and all the volume happens there.

Philex Zhang: But there’s a problem with centralization. A huge one. Here’s two examples: The first one actually just happened several days ago. The ITO of MASK I don’t know if you guys are aware of it.

Host: Exactly and we saw infura was down a while back, right ?

Philex Zhang: I think it was end of last year when ETH network was down because of infura.

Philex Zhang: It’s a very much anticipated launch but at the last minute they had to postpone it since their ROC provider QuikNode was overloaded with all the enthusiastic investors.

Host: Decentralized nodes = Never down

Philex Zhang: At the end of 2020 there was this huge incident where Binance, Metamask, Coinbase all went down at the same time for around 2 hours.

Philex Zhang: Because their node provider infura forgot to update their etherium node intime

Host: Yeah, it pretty much even scared me

Philex Zhang: Yes! This is the exact issue we are trying to solve.

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. And more amazing part is they can use several at the same time! So that when the volume becomes super huge, our algorithm will balance it evenly throughout all the service providers. So that it will remain stable.

Philex Zhang: For node service providers on the other hand, we provide a full SDK(software development kits) so that they can easily set up their server with Apron Network.

Host: That is amazing, how long has platform been in development?

Philex Zhang: We start to develop the idea at early 2020 and now we already have a fully working platform just launched on HECO ecosystem.

Host: Oh so platform is already launched?

Philex Zhang: It’s like a demo version of what developers can do with Apron Network. We’ll start to expand onto other block chains such as etherium, polkadot, Kusama and bsc once we can be sure everything is handled well.

Philex Zhang: We also received grant from web3 foundation and will be delivered the grants milestone in the next upcoming week.

Host: Congrats! That is huge step.

Host: I see you also have on-chain data indexing service, random numbers, price feed service etc. Lets cover these and start with on-chain data indexing service, what does that do or solve.

Philex Zhang: For sure! 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 contract. You will be using in on-chain data indexing service. Apron will be a platform for different types of service providers just like the indexing service providers onboard to participate into the network. We will do packaging, encryption and recombination for all the services provided by service provider so that if someone trying to attract a certain project by hacking the service provider they won’t know where to shoot.

Host: Amazing so you will act as a middleman for indexing.

Philex Zhang: Exactly in traditional web2.0 what we are doing is called middleware.

Host: Learning every day

Host: For nocoiners to understand 😉

Philex Zhang: Yes! Sorry if I was being too technical!

Host: Amazing, now nodes and indexes out of the way… Random numbers and quotation service, how and who will use them and for what？

Philex Zhang: Random number: For example, I may need to develop a NFT product like 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 it 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 data, plus his own algorithm to combine it into a new set of random numbers. That’s how we do. Quotation services are like insurance projects, which require real-time access to off-chain data. However, prices are different on different platforms, so we will let users choose freely.

Host: Amazing! Maybe we should move to tokenomics I guess? First of all, utilites

Philex Zhang: Yeah I think that’s what investors cares the most.

Philex Zhang: Okay there are several utilities for APN, our native token

Philex Zhang: 1. It’s used as payment to use service from 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 deflationary. This is very important because as we grow and more customer comes to apron network, more token will be burnt which means the value of the APN you and I are holding will increase.

Host: Indeed, those that understand tokenomics, love deflation.

Philex Zhang: 3. Staking. Token holders can choose to stake their APN token in the ‘inspector pool’ to earn a fixed income. ‘Inspector pool’ is for one of Apron’s role called inspector. The inspector will simulate the real user to call the usage data and judge the service situation or whether there is fake data. Inspectors will use some of the tokens in the pool as the test fee. The other part is the fixed reward for participating in Staking for token holders (normal users). The another part of staking is the provider staking APN token before providing a service to guarantee the quality of the service — a service staking reward for service providers.

Host: Very interesting actually, AMAs should always be very informative.

Philex Zhang: The maximum issuance of APN is 1 billion tokens, no pre-mining.
Institutional private sale constitutes 15% of the total amount and 25–30% will be unlocked after listing, while the remaining token will be unlocked within the following year.
Team has 5% of the tokens and 15% will be unlocked every 6 months after listing.
Advisor 3% having 25% unlocked after listing, while the remaining token will be unlocked within the following year.
Ecosystem construction 17%: these tokens are mainly used for LPO (slot auction), market activities, airdrops etc., and they are managed by the foundation.

Host: So we’re past tokenomics now, seems like demand is there. now, when is token launch?

Philex Zhang:We plan to launch around mid March. And we are in talk with top tier exchanges(I mean the real ones;)) and we’ll list on them once we launch.

Host: Don’t get me excited! :D

Host: Lets talk about partnerships

Philex Zhang: Definitely! In terms of project partnership we tend to take it slow. Currently we are working closely with polkadot projects Bandot and Trustbase because our teams have personal connection so that they can really give us constructive advice on how we can better serve them, so then better serve other projects

Host: Have you been approached by somebody, to use your service?

Philex Zhang: But we did actually receive a lot of interest from devs working in different projects a lot of good stuff in pipeline I can promise that

Host: Awesome!

Philex Zhang: Long term you can image Apron partner like Chainlink since we provide infrastructure that every project working on blockchain needs.

Philex Zhang: And it’s simply better than centralized ones

Host: Regarding marketing. What plans do you have to reach out to wider world?

Philex Zhang: We currently partnered with many different polkadot developer communities like one block and rebase across the world. Mainly in Asia but we expect to expand our marketing team further in to North America and Europe.

Host: You’re very welcome in Europe!

Host: Oh yeah last thing, About funding.

Philex Zhang: We just closed our first round institutional investment joined by PAKA, NGC, DFG, Candaq, Digital Renaissance.Vega Ventures.
Here is the link:
https://twitter.com/apronofficial1/status/1355095144828076034?s=21

Philex Zhang: And we’ll disclose our second round investors this week, I’m telling you you’ll be excited.

Host: Im really interested, will be watching you closely.

Philex Zhang: Definitely matrix!

Host: So this was Amazing!

Host: Nice job Philex!

Host: Impressive

Philex Zhang: Thank you guys so much for having me!

Philex Zhang: Love the vibe here.

Philex Zhang: All that for a better future of Blockchain👏👏

Host: Before you go, drop links of your social media.

Philex Zhang:

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