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.
