APEX Network blockchain development progress

3 min readAug 15, 2020

Development status report — #4

Inching ever closer to multiple product releases and the completion of several items on our roadmap, we are happy to share with you what has been going on for the last two weeks at APEX HQ:

Week 32 — tasks completed

Added a handful of light nodes to the blockchain — these will play a part in ensuring the stability of the mainnet
Constructed the development environment for the desktop wallet and drafted the structure of the application code
Researched pre-pruning schemes in relation to the operation of the APEX Federated Learning tree based model to optimize AFL performance
Actively researching alternative encryption schemes and programming languages — an interesting one is Go+ which is “born for speed” and suitable for data science while being compatible with Go. However this language is still in its infancy which makes us hesitant about adopting it for certain elements of our code
Researched various ways to further increase synchronization speed

Week 33 — tasks completed

Fine tuned the Javascript dev environment for the desktop client
Implemented pre-pruning of the binary tree for the tree-based model. This is a vitally important element for the APEX Federated Learning algorithms to increase efficiency and make the algorithms robust
Optimized “early stopping” of AFL, aimed at reducing overfitting while training AI algorithms — which increases efficiency
Summarized the work on our fast synchronization schemes, which applies to the synchronization of new nodes supporting the blockchain. Having worked on two different alternatives, we have chosen one which impacts consensus. This works through having the supernode write a hash snapshot of the global status of the mainnet, allowing anyone who runs a light node to download a recent snapshot — saving a lot of time compared to ordinary synchronization of the blockchain starting from the Genesis block.

As it pertains to our updated roadmap, those that compare the current update with development milestones will see that the work done over the last two weeks relates to the following items:

1 — Mainnet Redeployment (Late Q3/early Q4'20)

Finish thorough assessment of framework and codebase (Q3'20)
Implement new fast chain synchronization mode (Q3'20)

2 — Desktop wallet (Q4'20)

Initial release of the desktop wallet (Late Q3 / Early Q4'20)

3 — APEX Federated Learning (Q1'21-Q2'21)

Optimize encryption scheme efficiency (Late Q3 / Early Q4'20)
Framework refactoring and consideration of whether to switch to a more efficient programming language such as Go+ (Q2'21)

Next update expected at the same pace, approx 14 days from now!

Thank you for your time,

APEX Team