In early May, RealItems.org announced on Twitter that they were migrating their smart contracts from Ethereum to VeChain. For many, this announcement was the first time they’d heard of this project. Luckily, we had discussed the project at the VeChain Developer Summit in San Francisco and asked the co-founder and CEO, David Menard, if they’d be interested in discussing their project in more detail.
Q: Thanks for joining us. Would you be able to give some background on your project and its goals?
Thanks for having us! Real Items Foundation started as a proof of concept 2 years ago and has since grown into a company serving enterprise clients. Today, we offer brands an easy-to-use authenticity as a service platform with a generalized consumer experience to ensure safer products and higher brand engagement globally. Our goal is to bridge the gap in communication between brands and consumers, strengthening their relationship and story through authentication and digital ownership.
Our mission is to help onboard enterprise and consumers to embrace blockchain verified products. Real Items Foundation aims to establish standards for tokenized physical assets so that consumer protection protocols are incorporated into the digital identities, pegging micro services to each product. This includes asset registration, insurance, support and sweepstakes.
Q: What advantages does VeChain offer over the other platform’s you tested?
Prior to VeChain, we have tested various DLTs within the space. For instance, we tested Ethereum and DispatchLabs, before deciding upon VeChain. We found that VeChain’s API was better structured than Web3, and that we wouldn’t need to rely on a specific wallet interface in order to obtain a standard user experience. After migrating onto Vechain, the speed of transactions have been faster with Vechain along with a lower per item cost for tokenizing. This is ideal surrounding the scope of this project, and Vechain has been our 1st choice in DLTs ever since.
Q: With all the blockchain platforms out there, how did your team discover VeChain, and what made you attracted to it?
We discovered VeChain about 6 months after starting the project. We decided to rather focus on what our main solutions would be instead of thinking about projects like Waltonchain or VeChain as our competitors. It was almost perfect timing at the time, when we heard about the first VeChain Summit being in San Francisco. We decided it was time to look into the VeChainThor blockchain in order to truly understand how it works. I say perfect timing, because we had hit numerous walls with Ethereum at the time, that hearing about an alternative blockchain being EVM-compatible was something we welcomed. Within two weeks we were able to migrate our smart contracts to VeChain.
Q: Can you discuss some of the services you are currently providing (or planning to provide) for your clients?
We are providing managed services & solutions for brands to authenticate their production and engage their consumers with gamified content. For instance, enterprises will be able to use existing printing hardware to add blockchain verification capabilities to their packaging and/or product. We built something we like to call TAM – Tokenized Asset Manager. It’s a web application with various tools to create digital identities for products and the ability to add micro-services to tokenized products. This will be available to brands and the community on a subscription basis.
Q: How has the support been from both VeChain and the community?
The VeChain Foundation has been amazingly helpful, and the community has been very welcoming. We experienced this right from the start, as we publicly announced that we were migrating onto VeChainThor. Moreover, the technology has been equally inviting with a cleaner API, so it’s been fun getting to know people within the ecosystem and the tools themselves. Our goals align really well with VeChain and their enterprise-focused approach, and we are excited to contribute to this ecosystem moving forward.
Q: What can people do to learn more about the project?
We will be introducing ways to interact and learn more about Real Items. For instance, various Medium articles will be released while we try to create more genuine content as we develop things. Nonetheless, we want to provide real value and concrete results to the space, which is why we often focus on the core development and progress. These days, we have been working what feels like under a rock and we now feel that we should increase our focus to communicate with individuals and other projects that are working on similar things. To everyone excited about the tokenized future, please email us or reach out to us on Twitter @itemsdapp, to mention your superpowers and how you want to contribute.
