What Apex Network is, and why it is time to do your research

26 min readJul 4, 2018

What would you say if someone told you there was a blockchain project backed by a company on both the Forbes China top 50 growth potential list as well as the China Internet Weekly’s top 100 AI companies list.

A company that boasts more than 350 brand & enterprise customers, where 100 of those have been onboarded in the last year alone. What if they told you that those businesses are already using this company’s award-winning AI and big data products, and that a large share of them (more than 70 already) are hungry for this company’s upcoming blockchain solution to their B2C struggles.

And last but not least, what would you say if they told you that this company is run by China’s AI person of the year, featured on Forbes 30 under 30?

Yeah, I thought so. That’s Apex Technologies for you, and its CEO Jimmy Hu, parent company of the Apex Network.

Bite sized, please!

This article aims to present a comprehensive overview of Apex Network for those who are curious and want to start doing their due diligence. Due to the magnitude of this task, the article is fairly long. In recognition of my “Bite sized, please!” friends, I have made it possible to skip directly to your favourite topic. Do note, though, that some topics rely on information from previous paragraphs:

So what is Apex Network trying to accomplish?

Apex Network is developing a blockchain platform and ecosystem aimed at solving the problems currently faced by businesses in their B2C interactions to maximize the quality and actionability of their data while rewarding customers for sharing their data. And the best part? Apex Network puts the customer back in control of their data instead of relying on third party data hoarders who siphon data from consumers and run away with the profits.

Currently, businesses mostly rely on buying data from third party providers, leaving them with data that is of questionable quality and where it’s hard to tell if the data will even be actionable. Changing how this is done, by going straight to the source (the consumer), is a win for everybody involved, and the expensive middle man is taken out of the equation.

Apex Technologies has shown that they are able to meet the demands and fill the needs of their customers through their big data analytics platform NEXUS which delivers the entire data to action value chain, augmenting the data with their predictive AI module IQ. Take a look at their existing videos in this walkthrough.

Now they are aiming to integrate their existing suite of products with the Apex Network blockchain and ecosystem to provide an all-in-one GDPR compliant package for enterprises to improve their B2C interactions while at the same time empowering and rewarding the customers sharing their data.

For a deep dive into the nature of the B2C field, its issues and how Apex aims to tackle these, you can check out this article on the subject.

But how will Apex Network keep the customer’s data secure?

All customer data will be securely routed from the blockchain using SHA-256 hash and stored off chain in a distributed hash table on a collection of data cloud nodes (DHT Cloud). This ensures private data is not leaked while maintaining availability of the data.

Why will Apex make its own blockchain?

Originally intended as a Dapp project, Apex Network quickly realized that running as a dapp on someone else’s blockchain simply would not suffice considering the scope of the project. Thus came their development plan, outlining a whole ecosystem consisting of both a mainnet and sidechains, with cross chain functionality. But what on earth does this even mean?

Apex Network is basically creating a huge rewards alliance, where you and I as customers can earn rewards through sharing our data. Enterprises will launch their own sidechains on the Apex network with their own tokens which they can use to incentivize customer data sharing. The customer can then choose to redeem their tokens for discounted goods and services from the enterprise, easily swap their rewards for discounts from another enterprise on the network, or even opt to exchange the tokens for mainnet tokens (CPX) which can be extracted as regular currency (USD, Euro etc).

The trustlessness achieved through the use of an immutable ledger (blockchain) with integrated cross chain functionality will allow enterprises to skip lengthy and costly negotiations with potential partners, saving them valuable resources while enjoying the benefits of a free flow of assets within the ecosystem.

How large is the team developing the Apex Network?

Development is headed by CTO Richard Wang, who sports 13+ years of experience in C/C++, C#, Java/Scala programming and large-scale data processing and analytical platform, previously having worked for prestigeous companies such as Alibaba and Microsoft China.

Apex Network has 40 developers working full time developing the blockchain, wallet and applications as per the December 19th 2018 Development Update. This surpassed the target number stated mid 2018 of building a team of 35 highly skilled blockchain devs by EOY 2018. Detailed in the February Development Update, they have now slowed down hiring as they are nearing mainnet launch and have the dev resources needed to complete all upcoming tasks. They are however open to reviewing new applicants, but would only consider individuals with skill sets that could add something unique to the dev team. In addition to this, Apex Network enjoys the fruits of being backed by a large, working parent company, receiving assistance from the broader Apex Technologies team where needed (design, graphics, marketing). Apex Technologies has altogether around 150 employees, out of which approximately 70 are developers/engineers.

Experienced developers are crucial, and lead engineers in the blockchain team mostly come from the server infrastructure teams of prestigeous companies such as Alibaba and Tencent. Furthermore Apex Network has been recruiting engineers from enterprise software companies such as EMC, Redhat, Huawei and the private blockchain teams of fintech companies such as Pingan Technology. Core focus for the team when hiring new recruits are raw foundation (understanding of engineering, systems, architecture), intelligence (learning ability, problem solving ability), and track record at scale (building scalable systems at reputable technology companies) rather than “blockchain experience”, which in their experience is the least valuable.

“Engineers with a solid “raw foundation” as described above will be able to pick up blockchain infrastructure development quite easily. Their past experience creating deep-learning models and programming database kernels or telecom protocols may be more challenging work than blockchain engineering.” — Richard Wang, CTO, Apex Network

What’s the deal with the mainnet and sidechains, and how will Apex Network enable the transfer of assets between these?

Onboarding potentially hundreds of enterprises with a massive potential transaction volume on a single blockchain would carry a significant risk of clogging up the network as adoption progressed, and scalability is key for anyone aiming to become a major player in the blockchain industry. Through the deployment of sidechains Apex Network’s ecosystem effectively scales to meet the demands. Apex Network and CEO Jimmy Hu recognize that many enterprises would naturally lean towards approching blockchain tech through a private blockchain setup. In their sales pitches to the enterprise customer base they therefore emphasize that sidechains too in fact have similar features to private blockchains, but also provides features that private blockchains simply cannot provide. Emphasized among those features are the level of decentralization, robustness, connectivity and an on/off switch for the DEX Apex Network is developing. Read more about this in the February Behind the Scenes article.

Apex Network is developing its own decentralized exchange (DEX) which will provide a «one click» transfer of assets within the ecosystem. This is achieved through a two-way peg between sidechain tokens and mainnet CPX (Apex’ native token). Taking two of Apex Technologies’ existing customers (and thus potential Apex Network customers) as an example, Finnair and Hilton, this would enable customers to swap Finnair miles for Hilton nights or vice versa.

The DEX will be integrated into Apex’ own clients, the first iteration of the Apex Network desktop client (enabling staking) is set for August 2019. The same functionality can easily be integrated into the existing B2C interaction software already in use by Apex Technologies’ existing customers.

In a candid and transparent interview with the Apex community management team in February 2019, CEO Jimmy Hu elaborated on the DEX and what it means for Apex Network. He notes that Apex Network will likely run the first production use case of the DEX on a private blockchain level as its Proof of Concept. Next stage will realistically be enabling swapping of assets between sub brand and sub companies within the same conglomerate, while the ultimate goal is to enable cross company asset swapping in a fully public environment. Jimmy Hu emphasizes the DEX as one of the unique differentiators of Apex Network, ans has stated the following with regards to implementation of the DEX in a public environment:

“What this boils down to is; If we can achieve that milestone in 2020, Apex Network will be one of the blockchains with the most solid real life use cases out there — and in production mode.” — Jimmy Hu, CEO, Apex Network

What about the competition?

There are several crypto projects taking aim at the data exchange / B2C space, but this author has found none sporting the massive existing customer base (of Apex Technologies) or the same kind of solid suit of armour / package solution (Nexus + IQ integrated with the blockchain solution) as Apex Network. It is important to keep in mind that this is a $281b market, and there will be room for healthy competition.

A selection of Apex Technologies’ customer base

Apex Technologies and Apex Network — an all-in-one solution for B2C interaction

“Some projects try to solve the aforementioned problems at the application level, such as incentive points, exchange of data with consumers, decentralized advertising. However, currently there are no applications that have successfully solved these issues , and no real companies are using them.” — Jimmy Hu, CEO, Apex Network

But wouldn’t all these enterprises need to start from scratch and rebuild their entire B2C interaction framework? …and are enterprises even interested in adopting this product?

Not at all. Apex Network will release SDKs and assist enterprise customers in seamlessly integrating the blockchain functionality with their existing software. For the customer it’s as easy as updating their brand app. CEO of Apex Network and Apex Technologies Jimmy Hu has even stated that there may even be cases where the enterprise won’t even know they’re using the blockchain solution as it will be shipped with Apex Tech’s existing product NEXUS.

«We will release more details later — but I can say this, usage of Apex blockchain will be made as frictionless as possible, there may even be cases where the enterprise itself doesn’t know they’re using it (shipped with our existing software NEXUS)» — Jimmy Hu, CEO, Apex Network

Apex Technologies’ existing customer base consists of approximately 360 mid to large sized enterprises, with the smallest customers employing 1000–2000 people. In addition to this, 5–10 new enterprises are being added every month according to Jimmy Hu’s August 2018 interview with CryptoZombie. Also noteable is the fact that Apex Technologies started incorporating the blockchain solution in their sales pitch towards new enterprise customers in July 2018.

“We are seeing more and more of these companies being interested in blockchain right from the first pitch. Starting from a month ago we started incorporating Apex Blockchain into the sales pitches. We actually have a couple of revenue generating contracts already that also would mean that they would stake a particular amount of CPX to become a qualified enterprise to build applications on the Apex public chain.” — Jimmy Hu, CEO, Apex Network

On the subject of enterprise interest in the blockchain product, CEO Jimmy Hu gave an honest breakdown of the level of interest in his September 2018 interview with Blockchain Brad: Approximately 50% of the existing enterprise customers either do not care about or simply want to stay away from the blockchain product. 30–35% have an interest, but are unsure of how to make use of it, while 15–20% (approximately 50–70 enterprises) already have use cases in mind along with a good understanding of how they are going to leverage the blockchain solution to generate value.

“In some cases they want to stay away from it because it’s too close to crypto and they may be a fortune 500 or Fortune 1000 brand. Then there’s the second type, they understand the value blockchain can bring to the table but they don’t actually know immediately how they can actually transform this into value for themselves. Then there’s the third type that sees the value in this and has been thinking about blockchain related initiatives for some time now.” — Jimmy Hu, CEO, Apex Network

Considering the demands of running pilot programs both in terms of resources and time required, as well as the natural resistance often encountered from large enterprises to adopting new technology, CEO Jimmy Hu has the following expectations for Apex Network’s onboarding of enterprises — stated in his February 2019 interview:

“Keeping with realistic estimations, we hope to have around six enterprises that are extensively using the mainnet by EOY. Looking ahead to 2020, we aim to expand this to at least 10–15.” — Jimmy Hu, CEO, Apex Network

Among particular enterprises mentioned, the car manufacturer Maserati was the first of 20 piloting enterprises to have their name released. The first enterprise to be confirmed as onboarding the Apex Network blockchain is Treasure Carbon, a carbon asset trading company. Among the next enteprise names to be announced are a leading budget airline in China, as well as a Chinese electric car manufacturer. To read more about these enterprises and their intended use cases, please refer to the July 10th interview with CEO Jimmy Hu.

And how is this network run?

Apex Network plans to employ two different consensus mechanisms, each suitable to their intended purpose. The main blockchain / mainnet will feature a dPoS consensus mechanism, while PoS is the consensus mechanism of choice for the sidechains.

“Then the consensus mechanism uses DPOS for the performance of the main chain and POS for the sidechains, so it is a mixed consensus form. The use of POS on the sidechain is related to the potential application scenarios — Under normal circumstances, an enterprise user starting to use Apex may need multiple sidechains for multiple applications, so the potential number of sidechains is on a scale of hundred or thousand. The DPOS representative (delegates) election method is not suited for the required flexibility and scalability of sidechains.”
- Jimmy Hu, CEO Apex Network

The network will be run by enterprise grade supernodes — while these were initially intended first and foremost to be run by Apex core team and enterprises deploying their own sidechains, CEO Jimmy Hu recently announced that they intend to open up the possibility of community members applying to run their own supernode much earlier than expected. The supernodes are supported by community run voter nodes, while customer data is stores on a network of data cloud nodes which are also open to be run by community members.

“Once the tokenswap is completed it will be entirely possible for community members to achieve production status and actively participate in securing the network (validating blocks). […] We are still optimizing our node ecosystem, though one of our main motivations is to involve the community on a high level.”
- Jimmy Hu, CEO Apex Network

Smart contract architecture has also received special attention from Apex Network, where they will take a multi layered approach dividing smart contracts into three layers; The data layer, the logic layer and the middleware layer to improve efficiency. Particularly the logic layer will provide smart contract scalability.

Is the CPX token really needed?

The CPX token is absolutely essential to the Apex Network. As is obvious when considering the DEX functionality of the ecosystem; without the CPX token, there is no two-way peg, thus there is no DEX, and thus no ecosystem. Holding certain amounts of CPX tokens is also required run nodes to earn rewards, and rewards are payable in CPX.

One important fact that really underlines the essential nature of the CPX token is the fact that Apex Network itself will take profits solely through running nodes and earning rewards, just like token holders. In the words of CEO Jimmy Hu:

«The revenue model of a blockchain platform (not dApp) cannot be treated like a centralized platform, or would cause problems and bottlenecks in growth of platform and coin. Apex Core Development will run a good amount of Supernodes and Sidechains and will reap rewards from the system, just like any other partner.» … «Apex Technologies makes plenty money selling data technology and AI products.» When asked if this will be Apex Network’s only source of profits: «Yes, it is the only, as well as Data Cloud Nodes (DHT Cloud).» … «This is something that’s unique to Apex only as another way to take role and receive profits.» — Jimmy Hu, CEO, Apex Network

Some enterprises will likely stick with the dichotomous choice “private blockchain or no blockchain”. Apex Network is pragmatic and will cater to these enterprises as well to maximize resources for project development. Any revenue earned from such customers, as well as from the coding of enterprise smart contracts and developing dApps for the enterprises, will go straight back into supporting further development, marketing and expansion of the project. For those who feel fuzzy about how the traffic on the network will affect the flow of CPX in the ecosystem, CEO Jimmy Hu made the following statement in February 2019:

“Once a couple of enterprises start running their applications on the mainnet, it will affect the token dynamics in a very non-subtle way, showcasing the essential nature of the coin in the ecosystem.” — Jimmy Hu, CEO, Apex Network

What about token holder incentives?

Apex Network has three different kinds of token holder incentives known at the moment besides possible token value appreciation:

Staking rewards through tiered voter nodes:
T3: No minimum requirement
T2: 70k CPX minimum
T1: 200k CPX minimum
Genesis tier: 400k CPX minimum

- Advancing through the tier system will make each of your CPX tokens provide a larger staking reward compared to T3.
- T2 will increase the reward by 100% per CPX token
- T1 will increase the reward by 200% per CPX token
- Genesis tier will increase the reward by 300% per CPX token

The above weights are not to be misunderstood as a Genesis tier holder earning a 400% ROI as that would clearly be unsustainable. The increased rewards in the higher tiers are an incentive for holders to accumulate to increase their relative reward earned per CPX token held.

Supernodes:
Further details in the Node Ecosystem overview
- Minimum 2,000,000 CPX
- Must submit application and be approved by a committee
- Must run a server meeting certain requirements
- Open to both Apex, partners and certain community contributors.

- Rewards based on transaction fees across the main network and sidechains, ecosystem rewards and special node programs. Supernodes will keep 50–70% of these fees, distributing the remainder among the voter tiers.

Data Cloud Nodes:
Further details in the Node Ecosystem overview
- Minimum 20,000 CPX
- Entry level tech requirements will be low. Factors such as latency, storage capacity, computation speed and uptime will be combined into a reputation score to ensure use case-related requirements are met.

- Rewards; For each data transaction, 5% of the amount transacted will be paid as fees to the data node cloud.

Important note on requirements: Node requirements are inclusive, this means that a token holder holding 20k CPX will be able to run both a T3 voter node and be eligible to run a data cloud node at the same time, while someone holding 70k CPX will be able to run both a T2 voter node and be eligible to run a data cloud node at the same time and so on.

For all types of nodes it is important to note that the long term rewards do not rely on new CPX tokens being minted. The reward pool consists of tokens collected through network fees, and the reward mechanism is thus based on redistribution, ensuring that node rewards will not devalue the CPX token.

The Node Ecosystem overview

But how large are the staking rewards?

The short answer is: Staking rewards, supernode rewards and data cloud node rewards cannot be known until we see the degree of adoption and use of the mainnet and sidechains, as well as number of tokens staked and the distribution of those among tiers

This is actually one of the factors that make me trust the team. We are not told that “you’ll gain xx% annual returns” — they are honest and put forward how returns will be generated, whereafter we can assess this information and make our own decisions based on our findings.

The fact that Apex Network will get its profits solely from running supernodes and data cloud nodes indicates that CEO Jimmu Hu does not expect staking rewards to amount to «pocket change».

Even though exact calculations cannot be made, it is possible to use the information available to play around with different scenarios to see potential staking returns.

Feel free to input some arbitrary numbers in the below equations, keeping in mind that distribution among tiers will not be known until we reach mainnet, and total reward pool will depend on adoption and use of the network — these parameters are unknown. Keep in mind that use of the below information requires decent mathematical skills and is mostly intended by yours truly to show the mechanics of how staking rewards are calculated:

CPX staking rewards:
Share of reward pool per tier:
For Tier X;
([Total number of tokens staked] x [% of tokens in tier X] x [weight ratio of tier X]) / ([Total number of tokens staked] x [% of tokens in tier 1] x [weight ratio of tier 1] + [Total number of tokens staked] x [% of tokens in tier 2] x [weight ratio of tier 2] + [Total number of tokens staked] x [% of tokens in tier 3] x [weight ratio of tier 3] + [Total number of tokens staked] x [% of tokens in Genesis tier] x [weight ratio of Genesis tier])

Reward per CPX stack in a tier:
([Number of CPX held] x [Share of reward pool for applicable tier]) / ([Total number of tokens staked] x [% of tokens in applicable tier])

Weight ratio for the tiers:
T3: 1.00 (weight per token 10:10)
T2: 2.00 (weight per token 20:10)
T1: 3.00 (weight per token 30:10)
TGen: 4.00 (weight per token 40:10)

Reward pool:
30–50% of total supernode rewards

Dependant on transaction volume across mainnet & sidechains, size & status of supernode (unknown before mainnet launch).

What reason is there for CPX token value to increase?

The main reason for CPX token valuation to increase, looking past random market movements, would be the adoption and traffic on the mainnet and sidechains.

Remember that Apex is essentially creating a massive rewards alliance where customers will not only have transactions (with transaction fees befalling the supernodes) on each sidechain, but there will be a fluidity where CPX acts as the intermediary between sidechains when a consumer wants to exchange his/her Finnair loyalty tokens for Hilton hotel discounts…

Also, according to CEO Jimmy Hu the potential number of sidechains are 100–1000, and even the minimum amount of sidechains in that prediction amounts to 200m CPX locked down and unavailable for staking, increasing the rewards for those tokens that are being staked…

As a token holder, I very much like that the CPX requirements to run a supernode are so high — running a supernode is serious business impacting network integrity, requiring equally serious demands both on asset commitment (CPX) and the technical side, and should be available only for the largest holders in the community.

Considering that Apex Technologies onboarded close to 100 new brands and enterprises in the past year alone and will likely continue to grow (Forbes China top 50 growth potential), even onboarding 10% of these customers could realistically have Apex Network at 100 sidechains in some years time.

The important factor at work here is that those holding CPX tokens will choose what kind of node to run. Tokens vested in a supernode or data cloud node will not be available for staking, effectively reducing the fraction of circulating supply available for staking. This, in turn, will naturally increase the staking rewards for those who choose to stake their tokens.

How about current price? Current and future liquidity? When exchange? When moon?

Along with exploring the fundamentals of Apex Network potential holders need to consider opportunity cost and accessibility of the token on exchanges to make considered ecisions.

Apex Network held both their presale and crowdsale in January 2018. Token price at ICO was as follows:

Presale: $0.085 (factoring in the 20% presale bonus) per CPX
Crowdsale: $0.13 per CPX

All bonuses have been distributed and make up the current circulating supply of ~465m CPX tokens. The remainder of the total supply include the team tokens which are vested for three years with annual cliffs, bringing the total future circulating supply of CPX to 676m around January 2021 (including the ecosystem growth fund and the 10% company reserve).

The CPX token is, as of February 28th, traded for ~$0.007 on exchanges, meaning that new individuals entering and current holders accumulating are aquiring CPX at a significantly lower price compared to private sale prices. For individuals who do their due diligence and like what they find, the current entry price could seems quite attractive.

Exchanges have been a frequent topic of discussion. Apex Network has been on the same trajectory all along, they’re not looking for major initial hype that will surely fade as time passes and people realize there is an actual roadmap to be followed. CEO Jimmy Hu has mentioned that he likes the path of VEN and NANO, and it might be benificial to study the charts of those tokens.

CPX is currently traded on primarily three exchanges; Switcheo (Neo/Eth/Eos DEX), Hotbit and Lbank. These exchanges provide fairly low liquidity and limited accessibility for the token.

A new exchange listing is being looked into by the team. CEO Jimmy Hu has stated that there should be a new trading platofrm available before the October token swap from Nep5 to mainnet CPX. With a larger exchange would come the potential for increased liquidity.

What about the roadmap and developmental milestones?

The development of Apex Network’s blockchain and ecosystem is described in their roadmap, with new milestones set for each quarter. The beta multicurrency (Nep5 & Erc20) version of the mobile Apex Wallet was released in the autumn of 2018. The wallet can be regarded as a Proof of Concept, as consumers will not be required to download and start using a new application to interact with the blockchain — this is done through backend integration with existing enterprise applications to minimize the threshold for adoption. The Apex Network Testnet launch late November 2018, and a community testnet has been running alongside it since early December testing block production and transactions. In June 2019 Apex Network announced the launch of their initial mainnet technology with their Turing complete virtual machine and smart contract support. The blockchain is accessible through the block explorer featuring an integrated web wallet at tracker.apexnetwork.io. Since launch two additional supernodes have been deployed in Europe by community manager Jay (yours truly) and technical ambassador Aldo Raine, and the blockchain is currently stable with nodes spread across three continents (Asia, Europe, North America).

The Apex desktop client is expected to be released in August 2019, two months before the token swap, and the developers are working on Ledger hardware wallet integration. The desktop client will allow staking of mainnet CPX, and will in Q4 be upgraded with data cloud node functionality.

Other interesting updates expected in 2019 are:
- Complete development documentation for the Apex Virtual Machine
- Updated documentation regarding the node ecosystem
- First batch of supernode selections
- Initial dApp and ecosystem partner announcements before October, initial dApp launches in Q4
- First sidechain deployments in Q4

The original development roadmap of Apex Network (additional details about Q3/Q4 in the infographics above):

Are there any promising partnerships?

Apex Network and Apex Technologies boast an impressive array of data, infrastructure and ecosystem partnerships, and are transparent about what these partnerships entail:

Apex Network / Apex Technologies has a large number free Azure credits ($500,000 USD) from Microsoft and are incentivized to deploy off-chain part of solutions on their cloud.
They are certified to deploy enterprise solutions in big data, machine learning, blockchain using Azure
They have a cross-selling and marketing partnership in place with Azure’s BD and marketing teams and Microsoft BD receive commissions on customer acquisition for Apex Network / Apex Technologies.

Apex Technologies is a selectee of Microsoft Accelerator Shanghai in 2017.
Microsoft Accelerator provides capital resources, business/tech advisory, and technology partnerships.

“We’re also the first company out of Microsoft Accelerator to be on Forbes 50.” — Jimmu Hu, CEO, Apex Network

They are an AWS China Partner, works very similar to the Microsoft Azure partnership
They also have a joint BD/marketing agreement in place with AWS, where they provide Apex Network / Apex Technologies with brand customers in retail, automotive, and financial services sectors with the agreement to deploy part of the system on AWS

Tencent API partner, includes access to Tencent’s QQ display media assets, WeChat, and Tencent’s display network outside of QQ and WeChat.

They have a commercial partnership with Oracle Marketing Cloud China, in which theyshare and cross-sell brand customers. Oracle and Apex Technologies has various joint customers, including Maserati and Ferrari.
An API integration with Oracle Marketing Cloud Eloqua on our NEXUS platform. Brands effectively can use data acquired from Apex Network on Oracle Marketing Cloud capabilities and channels.

Some of Apex Network’s other major partnerships

Shanghai Data Exchange is one of the largest big data platforms in China and is backed and approved by Shanghai Municipal People’s Government propelling the data-driven capabilities of various core economic sectors. It also is the entity behind China’s first national engineering lab for big data distribution and exchange technologies. Apex Technologies and Apex Network has entered into a custom and exclusive cooperation agreement with Shanghai Data Exchange.
The partnership agreement would enable smart contracts running on APEX Virtual Machine to connect to a government-backed data validator, through Apex Network’s very own proprietary data integration middleware APEX Data Connector. This would ensure pilot program enterprise users as well as future long-term enterprise users of the Apex Network blockchain will be able to verify various B2C and B2B data transactions to insure quality and cost-effectiveness, according to Apex Network and Apex Technologies CEO Jimmy Hu.
Shanghai Data Exchange will also help add value to Apex Technologies’ artificial intelligence capabilities through dataset enrichment. Given that Apex Technologies has been in the Artificial Intelligence business since 2016, the company would have practical use cases on enhancing performance of its machine learning models in its flagship AI platform IQ.

“We could also technically acquire completely new datasets from the Shanghai Data Exchange consortium, but we plan to use the cooperation for data verification only, which already a big use case for our blockchain and its future dApps. Enhancing consumer consent and compliance protocols is one of the core principles we uphold when building Apex Network. We aim to help all of our enterprise users to adopt best practices become GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliant” — Jimmu Hu, CEO, Apex Network

The cooperation with the South Korean blockchain incubator and accelerator has already generated events (Apex Show), media coverage (online and TV), and contributed towards community building, but Apex Network and Trueblocks leadership have decided to take it further, focusing on:
Korean Exchanges — Trueblocks will support the Apex Network team in Korea in facilitating exchange relationships and exchange listings with the top Korean exchanges.
Commercial Partnerships — Trueblocks will help accelerate the strategic and commercial partnerships in the area for Apex Network including brands, technology companies, and other ecosystem partners.
Community Expansion — Facilitate growth of the Apex Network Korean community
Applications and Technology — Trueblocks will assist Apex Network in recruiting a Korean developer team to develop and localize customized applications, including a Korean version of the Apex Wallet.

Where can you find more info and get to know Apex Network on a deeper level?

Apex has a buzzing Telegram channel where you will find both a friendly atmosphere, helpful community members and a competent community management team — Apex Official Community (Telegram)
For the latest news and announcements, follow the Apex Announcement channel (Telegram)
The official Apex Network website contains an abundance of information about the upcoming blockchain and ecosystem
To read more about the parent company of Apex Network, head over to the Apex Technologies website
Any major news is also immediately posted by Apex Network on Twitter
For the Redditors among us, it’s possible to head over to the Apex Reddit
News stories are posted by Apex Network on Medium
The Behind the Scenes series provides additional insight into the project and its development — check out Behind the Scenes #1 by CEO Jimmy Hu here (July 2018), Behind the Scenes #2–1 by CTO Richard Wang here (September 2018), Behind the Scenes #2–2 by CTO Richard Wang here (September 2018), Behind the Scenes #3 by VP Product Richard Xu here (November 2018), Behind the Scenes #4 by CEO Jimmy Hu here (February 2019) and the July 2019 interview between the community management team and Jimmy Hu here.
Development Progress Updates provide excellent insights into the current state and progress of project development, and has been released steadily on a monthly basis since late 2018. Here you can find the December 2018, January 2019, February 2019, March 2019 and May 2019 editions followed by the mainnet technology launch announcement in June 2019.
In August 2018, CEO Jimmy Hu was interviewed by CryptoZombie, you can find the transcript here.
Shortly after, in September 2018, an updated interview with CEO Jimmy Hu by Blockchain Brad was released — YouTube video to be found here, and transcript here.
…and just 4 days later, YouTube personality CryptoCandor published her review of Apex Network which you can find here.
Sometimes potential and existing token holders have additional questions, and many of these have been answered through the three earlier AMAs with CEO Jimmy Hu — the first of which can be found in video format here, and transcripted here, while the Chinese AMA is available here and the most recent from February 2019 can be found here.
For a quick overview of the Apex Network and what it aims to accomplish, check out the community made Apex infographics
If you are ready to really dig into the ecosystem envisioned by Apex Network, the Apex Network Development Plan provides an abundance of information
In depth information about the different kinds of nodes are available here: Apex Network Node Ecosystem Overview
Apex Network releases new updates to GitHub upon major changes. To view the current repository, visit the Apex Network GitHub.
CEO Jimmy Hu held an exclusive event in Korea on April 14th 2018, and video footage of his speech can be found here.
If you feel like dropping by, here’s where you will find them:

Thank you for taking the time to read this article! Now that you have had the opportunity to discover Apex, please consider taking some time to inform your friends of what you have found.