Recently CEO Jimmy Hu of APEX Network sat down to record and release a podcast response to the AMA questions submitted by the community. With the full podcast version released on YouTube, we are happy to share with you the written transcript for you all to easily look up interesting sections and share with others — enjoy!
Introduction
Hey guys, it’s Jimmy!
Today I’ll be doing a podcast version of answering the AMA questions submitted late last month. Now, let me start by talking about communication and the community: We will be increasing the frequency of communication with the community from now on, and in terms of AMA format — as I have previously mentioned — we will seek to do future ones live on Telegram. We have determined that, along with the community management team, to be the most effective method to communicate with you guys in the most timely manner. Additionally, based on several requests we will be doing a new tour of the office, a video tour of the office, very soon — we expect to release one by next week.
The APEX team
In terms of the team, everybody’s doing okay and no one has been affected by COVI19. It’s my sincere wish that everybody in the community stay safe, and that everybody takes the necessary precautions and mask up during this very unfortunate period of time.
The team is currently around 120 people, with 15 fixed members of the blockchain team and around 10 personnel that shifts from blockchain and other tech products based on the actual workload that, you know, Nexus and IQ represents. Regarding the shifting part; they are not on APEX Network’s payroll, and is funded entirely by APEX Technologies which operates completely separately.
Token unlocks, value, liquidity and market making
As of currently, close to 95 percent of the team tokens have been unlocked, and there is no plan currently to put any additional employees of APEX Network on a token schedule — including the ones that joined this year.
In terms of token value and liquidity, I would like to address that before everything else. We are in a phase where we’re starting to seek new exchanges. As the project has a certain amount of revenue to add to our extended runway and reserves, we are able to actually communicate certain paid arrangements with exchanges that we’re talking to now. So we have restarted the process of talking to and seeking potential partnerships with new exchanges.
We will also initiate a corporate buyback of CPX, but via the exchanges. So starting next month we will be initiating buying back certain amounts of CPX through the exchanges to stimulate liquidity as well as price management to a certain extent.
Based on my most recent conversation with the Lbank CEO, they’ll be relisting a CPX/USDT pair once they have the market making mechanism ready, which will provide liquidity provision as well as additional volume to the pair.
Now, in terms of market makers we are currently in the process of talking to independent market makers, as well as exchanges that have market making capability, to provide additional liquidity of their own or through a cost by us.
Many of you have seemed to be interested in what happened to the previous market maker. We are still in the process of having them be held legally liable, but in the process there have been certain hurdles as the main individual involved is a EU citizen but currently hiding in Russia. It’s hard to find the person involved and pinpoint the location, currently we’re in the process of using various different methods to go after them and I will keep you updated.
APEX and government regulations
There have also been some questions regarding government regulations surrounding the blockchain industry and cryptocurrencies that may relate to APEX. The regulation side has not really changed much since the last time we had an AMA, and it’s still more of a “encouraging blockchain technology” angle and “discouraging cryptocurrencies / icos” as well as communities and marketing. How we operate in China basically complies with these particular regulations and stances, so no Chinese community is currently either official or functional at this point. There are various WeChat groups run unofficially, but we do not maintain a Chinese Telegram nor official WeChat group anymore as recommended by our legal counsel.
As for government policy towards blockchain technology in general we’ve seen some very good developments in that we are currently applying for certain grants for blockchain technology, and it’s also encouraging us to file for a few blockchain patents that will also help us acquire blockchain tech related grants and funding in the future from the government.
Ecosystem and enterprises
Next, I will go over developments in technical aspects; the ecosystem, enterprises and partnerships. But before that I would like everybody to know that we’ll be releasing a new version of the roadmap before the end of this month.
Currently, the initial four pilot programs that were previously running for the past half a year or so will be nearing their end and will reach a wrap-up state very soon. Once the pilots wrap up, the first one as early as in August, we will provide our community with certain insights on particular feedback as well as certain metrics used in the pilot program. When these particular enterprises, if they decide to go to the next stage — production mode — CPX will definitely be used for most and all of the operations that would be executed on the chain as well as for fees.
The method in which they acquire the majority of the CPX used will be done in a managed mode, which means that they will not aqcuire it themselves but through a third party or through us. If it’s through us, it will be acquired through the liquidity pools and exchanges.
The token swap
Various questions have been asked regarding the token swap. Now, the token swap is an issue that we’ve been putting a lot of thought into, and is not something that we wanted to do right away as there’s various things that were tied to the state of the token itself. For example, including the case of exchanges, whether the current platforms are ready to integrate the new token, and the timeline of how that would take place. Also certain strategic partnerships, we have been in talks with other blockchain projects that may affect the nature of the token swap.
To put it in blunt terms, there have been certain blockchain projects that approached us to do a merger. A token merger basically means that we take the best technology of both projects, merge the market cap and take the best liquidity out of the two.
That’s rarely been done, but there have been parties that have approached us and we are actually considering it, though I would say that the likelihood is relatively low as it would need to be a very compelling story for us to actually really consider it. Therefore, considering various different factors, the team would have the discretion of determining when and the manner in which to execute a complete token swap for the maximum benefit of the project, the ecosystem as well as liquidity channels.
There are also various different ways that the swap can take place, and the medium through which it takes place. For example, whether it’s on the exchanges or through a particular app mechanism, and whether that will take place through the desktop app or through a mobile application. These are all different things that we would have to consider. And whether it’s one step or it’s multiple steps, that would have a particular transition phase of first swapping a certain portion of the tokens which are not being traded. These will be used for network and application purposes, and the ones that will be continuously traded can actually stay as NEP5 which represents a stakeholder or a placeholder for the new mainnet token.
Federated learning
Let’s talk a little bit about the federated learning module. Why this module is quite interesting is most of these enterprises are already using machine learning in one form or another, whether on our platform on some other platform through an internally built tool, or through certain open source projects.
It’s something that has matured use cases for predictive analytics — the thing is for federated learning when we add a blockchain layer into that, it does not really change the nature of how it really solves the problem. Instead it adds an enhancement to it that allows more data, more collaboration, and integration of privacy protocols if some of this data is directly consented from the consumer.
So this contrasts to how we’re running the pilot programs that we’re doing currently — this is more seen as of a new way to do certain things that have existed — new ways of managing it completely, new platforms, etc. Just consider kind of the bureaucratic and the process level gap it takes from going from a CRM based point system to a blockchain based rewards point system is much harder than just replacing a pure centralized machine learning model with a decentrally computated one. There is a possibility of turning it into a scaleable service, and of course I’m referring to federated learning. By scalable service I mean that it may go into a suite of a larger set of AI tools or machine learning tools, and the federated learning module is one small part of that — but it would be used basically in the same way using a credit system which could be cash based. In turn, for the federated module part, instead of directly saying what each unit of computation would require in cash, the user can also use cash, or some form of USDT or so, and it would basically automatically convert it to CPX — or they could completely just use CPX to perform the task.
I did get a lot of questions this time and many of these questions were very similar or close to being identical, so the points that I just covered were the answers to various categories of questions.
Miscellaneous questions
I did get a particular large number of miscellaneous questions that can’t really be well categorized, and and some of these were quite interesting. I would just go over a few for purposes of time constraints we can’t really go over all of them today. Though I do hope to go over the rest the next time we have a live telegram AMA.
When you are online on telegram are you looking at APEX chat or are you here for other reasons?
I do have telegram open pretty much all the time, but I do not really look at it much. When I do I open up the APEX chat and sometimes I see questions, and in rare cases I answer them directly. Most of the time I do not really have the time to put together a response, but based on the feedback I’ve been getting, it seems like the community welcomes responses directly even if they’re brief. I will definitely keep that in consideration!
How can CPX holders contribute to the business side of things and when?
This is an interesting point. This is a very good point and something that we haven’t actually considered — that CPX holders can be kind of extensions of the project itself in terms of the business side of things or the business work side of things, or even the business ecosystem side of things. This is something that we will actually take into consideration to see if there’s any incentive plans for certain community members to contribute to the business side of things. Though, that does have to be defined to a certain extent. Does that mean revenue generation, or does that mean partnerships, or does that mean increased liquidity for CPX, etc.
Why can’t a Chinese group on Telegram be found?
I think I did explain that in the previous points, currently we want to be a project with large longevity. Hopefully, perpetual — which probably is not possible, but in order for that to happen we do need to follow regulations close as possible. So based on what I mentioned about Chinese government’s stance, it’s very advisable through our legal counsel that we do not have an officially managed Chinese community.
Do you consider making a unified website for APEX Network / APEX Technologies?
Currently that’s not within the plan because after all, these two projects operate as independent companies, with independent payrolls and teams — though with APEX Technology sometimes donating some tech resources to APEX Network.
Please provide an update on backers and partners; are they still with us, and if not why are they still on the website?
I would say most of the backers and partners are still with us, they have not changed. The private sale investors, the majority of them, basically have held — however, some have disclosed that they’ve sold a portion. I think the ones that we’ve listed have held, including the ones that are a planned supernode operator.
Why are there no news updates on the main website?
That is something that we can actually work on!
Would rebranding be beneficial for the project’s visibility? For example, if you google “APEX crypto” there’s not much mention of the project?
That is actually within some kind of plan. There’s various different projects that do rebrandings, and not all of them are successful. Sometimes it turns out for the worse but we are actually considering it in this case to actually give more of a distinct, and more of a marketable identity to the project. Including the CPX coin itself, so that’s definitely within our consideration, that’s something that we would decide on quite quick.
Final Thoughts — additional use cases?
So those are all of the miscellaneous questions that we will answer for today, and on a closing note, we’ve been putting quite a bit of time into considering the business model for APEX Network moving forward. By business model, we also mean inclusive of the token model.
If we look at the blockchain landscape right now, and compare it to two or three years ago, there’s something that you notice. Things on an application level, or on a planned level of any new blockchain project, they’re probably focusing on a smaller use case and a more quicker-to-value use case, than more of the grand plans of the public blockchain projects of 2017 and 2018.
I’m not saying either is good or bad, but it gets us thinking whether there are certain ways for us to use or to apply CPX more directly, even without the enterprise ecosystem. Whether there are certain direct ways to apply the use case of CPX and not having to wait for the enterprise ecosystem to grow.
That is something that we’re actually working on currently. I’m not gonna say anything today, but I think we’ll get more insight once the new roadmap is released to the community!
All right guys that’s it for today, hope everybody stays safe! Thank you.
Jimmy Hu,
APEX Network CEO
APEX Network
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