APEX — The future of CRM?

So in this article I decided the step outside of the world of Masternodes and write a short piece about a project that I have been invested in for a while now.

That project is APEX.

What is APEX?

In simple terms APEX want to solve the inherent problems experienced by both customers and enterprises over the way customer data is held and used.

APEX call this the “Data & B2C Interaction Problem”.

For example — customers experience issues when organisations hold their information centrally and this data is either lost, compromised or released to 3rd parties without their permission.

And organisations are looking for ways to improve and enhance the way they interrogate and leverage the customer information they currently hold about buying patterns, customer preferences and other valuable information that can be used to ensure they are both giving the customer what they want but also ensuring potential revenue streams are identified and maximum benefit is derived.

How will they solve this problem?

Well — this is best summed up by the following:

The vision of APEX Network is to build stronger 1-to-1 relationships between the enterprise and consumers through proprietary blockchain technology — transforming how interactions, information, and value is exchanged throughout the B2C engagement process. APEX Network will help facilitate increased trust, privacy, and transparency for B2C interactions. It will also optimize efficiency, cost-effectiveness and help eliminate middlemen networks when necessary

There are four key considerations that the team at APEX are looking to address in the deployment of the network. These are:

Speed-to-Value

This relates to how you can derive maximum benefit from the information held to build out an ecosystem whereby the benefits across all areas (enterprises, brands, consumers, application partners and technology partners) can be stacked efficiently and effectively.

Here is where the speed aspect comes in — processes around the adoption of the technology must by timely and effective. This covers various elements such as built-in enterprise features, ease of development, SDK/API robustness, and level of support for POC (proof of concept) stages.

Connectivity

In order to leverage information held outside of the blockchain, and to maximise real value, connectivity and integration is needed to the ‘real world’ and existing systems such as real time data streams from external centralised, or decentralised, apps and data — this is critical for many enterprise level applications.

Most public chains (Ethereum being a very well known example) connectivity is achieved via ‘oracles’ (Oracles watch the blockchain for events and respond to them by publishing the results of a query back to a given smart contract.). These are built as external add-ons rather than integrated native modules. Being able to build out applications with these connectors built in can improve the process to deploy significantly.

Scalability

In essence applications need to be able to grow and expand without constraints depending on the speed of the requirements of any current or future functionality within the application but also be able to cater for an ever increasing number of members. Most public blockchains struggle with this aspect. If a blockchain is to be considered scalable it must also be able to handle outages and as such have redundancies built in.

dApp Ecosystem

Depending on the primary application use case of the blockchain, the way the dApp ecosystem is built out could vary. Ideally, the developer ecosystem creates apps organically over time, but if its main use-case is enterprise heavy, Apex will need to focus on accelerating value and usable solutions first. To accelerate value, the core developer of the project as well as strategic partners would need to develop or propel some basic applications that fulfill an initial use case, and then either open source it or even release an SDK for customization and quick development.

For more information on the development plan for APEX I would recommend you take a look at the following paper — http://cdn.chinapex.com.cn/med/videos/to/APEX-Development-Plan-eng.pdf

APEX has nodes?…..

Well whilst I did say at the beginning of this article this was me stepping out of the world of Masternodes I guess I wasn’t entirely telling the truth…. and this is one of the key reasons why I like APEX (naturally of course!).

There will be three different types of nodes on the APEX network. Supernodes and Voternodes will participate in network consensus and Data Clouds nodes which provide data storage functionality.

And yes, it will be possible to run one of these three different types of nodes on the APEX blockchain.

Supernodes

Similar to a standard masternode these Supernodes are responsible for processing and validating transactions across the network as well as resolving consensus related issues. They will also be able, in the future, to create new ‘side-chain’ off of the APEX blockchain.

However to run a Supernode you will need quite a sizable number of CPX — 2,000,000. It is very likely these will only be accessible to enterprise level organisations.

Voternodes

OK so there are four tiers of Voternodes and they all require a different amount of collateral to run them. For each node there is a minimum spec required but these aren’t particularly high and all you will need to do is run the CPX wallet on this machine to run a node.

Genesis — These will require a collateral of 400,000 CPX

Tier 1 — These will require a collateral of 200,000 CPX

Tier 2— These will require a collateral of 70,000 CPX

Tier 3— These have no minimum colleteral requirement.

If you are lucky enough to hold 70,000 CPX or more then you can also take part in the Kratos airdrop program — more detail here.

APEX Releases KRATOS One — Multi-wave early node incentives

Cloud Data Nodes

So there isn’t a huge amount of detail available as yet about the requirements to run a Cloud Data node but what we do know is there will of course be a level of minimum storage needed plus you will also need a collateral of 20,000 CPX.

More detail on the nodes and what you need to consider to run one can be found in this document: http://cdn.chinapex.com.cn/med/videos/to/APEX-Node-Ecosystem-0622.pdf

So, where can I buy CPX?

The best place to find where you can buy CPX is to check their page on Coin Market Cap here — https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/apex/

If you are interested in finding out more about APEX here are some key links to help you with your research:

Website https://apexnetwork.ioTelegram https://t.me/APEXcommunity Reddit https://www.reddit.com/rTwitter https://twitter.com/APEXnetworkCPX

#DiscoverAPEX

APEX — The future of CRM? was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.