On February 20th, social media lit up with some renders of a modern future city powered by VeChain. The original post, from video game concept artist Darron Smith, talked about how the twin brothers decided to make the city as a gesture of gratitude towards the VeChain community. The high-resolution images are sized to be used as wallpapers.
Remarkably, while the images on social media are just renders, the city is a series of actual 3D models, complete with lighting, sidewalks, and VeChain-themed vehicles. The models are powered by Unreal Engine and can be explored or “flown through” to make animated videos. Creating all this was not as simple as it might seem, with the two Smith’s claiming they spent weeks designing and building the models by hand.
The Smart City is the latest 3D Environment art project created by my brother and I. This project was was a great way to give back to the Vechain community and ecosystem. I believe cryptocurrency is the future and we wanted to create a conceptual smart city that featured the ecosystem we truly believe in. The tools used to create the Smart City are Luxology Modo, Marmoset Toolbag, Substance Painter, and Unreal Engine 4.
In the creation of this project, I was responsible for creating the the emissive signs, buildings, and post production. I had a lot of fun working on this project and I appreciate all who have taken the time to view our work.
The brothers teased that after all the fun they had, there might be more updates in store. Listen to the full-length interview on the second half of VetCast #16:
With China locked down to slow the spread of the deadly nCoV outbreak, VeChain’s main office in Shanghai began working remotely, with each member completing their tasks from their own homes.
The biggest announcement was from ShareRing, which announced the VET would be a payment method on their upcoming travel platform. This opens up payment options for up to 2.5 million hotels in 190 countries, according to the ShareRing website.
Recently, VET as a payment token has gathered more steam after Jur announced users paying in VET would receive a 5% discount for buying luxury property in Cyprus. The ShareRing platform is set to launch on February 8th of this year.
Another third-party project Real Items also made their presence felt with the announcement that “mass adoption” would begin on February 22.
Real Items is a SaaS platform that allows companies to tokenize and tag products with 2FA QR codes, establishing ownership of and sharing product information with consumers. They recently announced their plugin was live in Shopify, one of the most common eCommerce portals online, used by over 1 million businesses.
Another third-party partner, Fresh Supply Co, was active on social media with the founder David Inderias announcing that “Big things [are] developing”. In the past, he has spoken often about his work with large producers in Australia and New Zealand. Fresh Supply Co’s solutions tag natural products like avocado, crabs, and honey, which they then consume locally or export to regions like China. Inderias is a big believer in presenting blockchain solutions with an attractive user-friendly style, including data, media, and additional info that makes the consumption process more engaging.
Our last third-party of the roundup is board game producer PlayTable and 8Hours Foundation, creators of tabletop digital board game consoles. PlayTable announced they were nominated for the Innovation in Connecting People Award at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. SXSW is one of the biggest cultural festivals in North America, showcasing the biggest contributors to music, film, and entertainment.
This caps a busy few weeks for PlayTable and the 8Hours Foundation, who recently announced the addition of Guitar Hero founder Kai Huang as an advisor. Their consoles have begun shipping, with the first pre-ordered batches beginning to arrive.
Before we go, a quick teaser for next week: VeChainstats.com Founder Fabian and Vesign.io’s Marcel are set to release their latest dApp – a manager dApp compatible with Ledger Nano. Users will be able to send funds, manage nodes, transfer, sell… ah never mind, just wait till next week to get the exhaustive list of features.
Active Twitter users may have noticed @lunarcrush, an account trending on many of the popular VeChain feeds. LunarCRUSH compiles data from social media platforms, markets, and other community sites to create a real-time scoring indices. Showing which cryptocurrencies are being talked about is a potentially valuable metric for investors and projects trying to gauge demand. Ben Yorke sat down with Joe Vezzani, the founder and CEO of LunarCRUSH, to learn more…
BY: Thanks for joining us! How’s 2020 treating you so far?
JV: Wonderful. We started 2020 in the crypto-space with a major market rally. Even though I do not believe Bitcoin and crypto are perfect in their negative correlation – we have seen yet again an example when there is global unrest, the crypto markets rally. The main word to focus on is global. Cryptocurrency is extremely global and when investors think about this market, they have to be focused internationally. Personally at LunarCRUSH, we see well over 50% of our users come from outside the US.
BY: Interesting, that’s similar to VeChain, where many of our community come from Europe, Asia, and Australia. But anyways, let’s get started. I’m going to throw a few questions at you: How do you see users benefitting from LunarCRUSH? Can you shed some light on how the platform should be used? Who are the ideal users?
JV: I will start with the last question. Our ideal user is anyone who wants to learn more about how cryptocurrencies create value, and what makes them valuable. Right now for most of the retail market, cryptocurrencies are speculative investments. And everyday they become less speculative and move more into an established investment.
What we have identified at LunarCRUSH, is that unlike traditional stock markets, cryptocurrencies move more based on social supply and demand. We like to say, without a community, there is no crypto. We believe all cryptocurrency investors, new and old, should be focused on looking at the project’s community, and how it’s grown or shrunk over time. It’s an indicator you cannot ignore.
With that, a great place to start learning is to sign-up for LunarCRUSH and keep track of how social volume is trending over time. Social volume is the make-up of every unique metric across social media. Basically a unique volume of mentions across sites like Twitter, Reddit, Medium, Youtube. Places where the conversations are happening. Below is an example of what you can see on the platform:
Price vs. Social Volume – 3 Month Chart for VeChain
BY: Time to drop some knowledge on us. What industry insights have you been observing recently? How could we interpret this? JV: I will pick on Bitcoin a little for this one since it is the broadest of the coins with regards to market interest and knowledge. For those of us heavy in the industry, you need to get out and talk to people who are far away from the industry. Many people still only know Bitcoin and nothing else.
One thing we are seeing is an increase in retail interest. With the run up in the first half of 2019, we did not see the same level of retail interest. When the price of Bitcoin was hitting $12,000 at the beginning of August, mentions were maxing out at roughly 50,000/day. Today, as we speak, the daily mentions for Bitcoin has risen to above 80,000/day, and the price is about 30% less than we were in August. This indicates that retail investors are starting to gain interest again, and that’s a good thing for the crypto-space as a whole.
BY: Seeing as we are a VeChain community, are there any trends or insights you can share about the VET ranking? JV: We have truly enjoyed interacting and getting to know a lot of the veChain community. What a great group of passionate and engaged individuals working together as one.
In order to help investors access how a project is fairing against the rest of the market from a price and community perspective, we created the LunarCRUSH ALTRank™. The ALTRank™ combines price performance and social metrics to give investors an integrated look at how a project has grown and held value over time.
VeChain has not fallen out of the top 200 ALTRank™ since we developed the metric in 2019. We have another motto, “Not all Alt Coin’s are created equal.” And it is the reason we created the ranking. We wanted to understand how a coin’s community affected the value of the project. So far we have found the two to be highly correlated.
VeChain ALTRank™ over the last 3 months, never above 200
VeChain ALTRank™ over the last 7 days, never above 125
BY: How did you get into this industry? What made you decide to turn this into a website? Judging from the professional look of the platform, you’ve clearly done this kind of thing before… JV: Like anyone else who learned about cryptocurrency in what I like to call Phase II, 2013-2017, the technology was the perfect intersection between software and finance or technology and money. By solving the double-spend problem it made a new world possible. And if that does not fire you up, I don’t know what will.
I started my career in finance but moved away very quickly as I entered the market here in the US when the market was crashing. I always like to share the screenshot I took at my first job.
The day the bailout happened, I knew the system was broken. We had no choice at the time, which is actually a reinforcement for it’s brokenness.
I did not know how the market crash would affect my decisions later in life, but have always been curious during my career. Asking too many questions, challenging the “we did it like that last time” way of thinking. I felt it was important to gain experience in different sectors, working completely different jobs the entire way.
I’ve helped build a couple major pieces of software within the start-up space and for the Fortune 500 and gained insight along the way.
Even with my finance background, my true calling was always within software. It stemmed from gaming as a child. When playing the original Rainbow 6, if you wanted to be any good, you had to learn to speed up your CPU and create the lowest latency possible, even when you did not have all the tools. You had to be scrappy. There was teamwork involved and everyone was in a different place. It was fast and you had to make quick decisions. I honestly give my early gaming days the most credit when it comes to working in today’s decentralized marketplace.
As you transition those skills to the workforce, it’s important to learn how things are done differently, and why they may work in some cases and not in others. When you have a massive corporation, most of it is setup to protect the billions of dollars in sales and the nitch in the market. They are not setup to grow, innovate, and expand. That is okay though, our world does need economies of scale and big businesses. You cannot fly to the moon without them.
I have always worked well in a smaller and more nimble setting where I can connect with my team 1 on 1. Inspiration, creativity and big ideas come from small ultra-passionate groups of people who have learned to calm and control their ego.
When starting LunarCRUSH, that is exactly what we had. We wanted to solve a problem no one else was solving correctly. We had a small passionate group focused on customer experience and design. We believe we can bring transparency and confidence to the market.
After suffering financial hardships, VeChain’s previous block explorer VeForge went offline. For many of the community members, this was a major issue, as block explorers are an ideal place to gain insights about the volume of the mainnet, track addresses, and monitor the state of transactions. Officially, VeChain erased any fears by announcing they would soon have replacements online. Still, that left a temporary gap where most users were unsure of how to stay informed on current blockchain data.
Unsurprisingly, the VeChain community responded quickly. The community is not without talented developers, including MiRei, who wasted no time in building veblocks.net, which features simple visualizations of daily mainnet traffic.
Veblocks.net shows data for either the mainnet or the testnet
Naturally, we couldn’t have a conversation about VeChain websites without mentioning Fabian from VeChainstats.com. Within 24 hours, Fabian had announced his intention to upgrade his site to include features previously unique to the now defunct block explorer. In true VeChainStats fashion, an idea soon spread to an obsession, and now Fabian is implementing custom analytics features and an entire block explorer that will not only match the competition, but far exceed it. He will need a few days before pushing his upgrades online, but by next week we should have a functioning tool that allows users to track all types of data related to wallets and smart contracts.
In the meantime, there are plenty of other options for people seeking blockchain-related traffic. VeChain’s in-house serverless block explorer VeChain Insight offers a lightweight alternative to anyone seeking transaction or account information. In order to help the developer community, the dev team rapidly upgraded VeChain Insight to include testnet data.
For those seeking token insights, don’t forget to download the Official Sync Wallet and Browser. This is a portal to a number of valuable token dApps such as My Tokens, VeChain Tokens, and Wallu. Moving forward, the Sync browser will play an important role in connecting to Ledger devices, once VeChain officially launches their new portal. This has the added benefit of allowing Ledger users to use dApps such as Vexchange or other marketplaces, a feature not possible when using the previous Ledger solution.
As the community waits for a replacement for Ledger support and the Official Block Explorer, it’s easy to see that the VeChain Ecosystem isn’t short on talent and dedication. The road to mainstream adoption is not without obstacles, but hats are once again off to a community willing to take action.
Veblocks.net shows data for either the mainnet or the testnet