Mainnet comes first, but what about sidechains, sidechain consensus and scalability? Can we have the DEX ready on mainnet launch?

Our original roadmap stated that mainnet was planned for Q2 2019. However, due to the productivity within the team as well as the rapid expansion of the team I am now very confident that we can achieve deployment of the mainnet in Q1 2019. We will as a matter of course work with external organizations to review the code, ensuring the quality of the code and the security and stability of the blockchain. After mainnet launch we can focus on the deployment of sidechains, and based on where we are at now, I aim to have us ready to deploy the first sidechains in Q2 2019.

While on the subject of sidechains, it’s important to note a few aspects about their consensus mechanism. The sidechains will run a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism that the enterprise’s Supernode on the main network has no role in validating. Rather, the sidechain will be validated by a different set of decentralized nodes which Apex Network’s core development will provide the infrastructure for via the voter node ecosystem. Alternatively, if the enterprise wishes to host its own sidechain infrastructure, they also have an option to do so, and it would essentially become like a hybrid borderline private network. Note that given all technical and use-case nuances are taken into consideration, it is not our job to argue with the enterprise users on issues such as these in priority of adoption.

Typically with projects like ours, everything looks good in design as well as conceptually. Real scalability testing is however done through battle testing while the piece of tech is running in production mode. We are currently in the process of moving a team of 3–4 testing engineers from Apex Technologies to the blockchain team for this purpose, to get ready for when testnet comes around. The 3-layer smart contract architecture helps in the long run when a sizable number of applications are run on the network, but this is not really the crux of the problem. You can be assured that we have a realistic view on this, and are planning to deploy ample resources within the company to solve any scalability issues that could arise.

The DEX is on the roadmap for Q3/Q4 2019, but this could possibly change depending on the speed of both development and adoption / deployment of sidechains. A DEX protocol in itself is not difficult to build — it would require that the mainnet and the virtual machine is up and running reliably first. I think the challenge of this module is that it’s actually sort of an ecosystem in itself with quite a few moving pieces. You need a certain number of tokenized enterprise assets first, and then the reserve holders who provide the liquidity.