VeChain Weekly Update (July 3rd)

VeChain Weekly Update (July 3rd)

by | News

After last week got shortened by the Dragon Boat Festival, the VeChain team was back at it again. The first week in Q3 saw VeChain celebrate the two year anniversary of launching the mainnet and gave us a chance to reflect on how far the project has come. It coincided with the release of the latest executive report and we also saw some community projects announce major breakthroughs and progress.

VeChain Financial Executive Report #11 Published, Buyback re-started

The quarterly financial report was published, and with it contained some interesting news. Added to the usual token supply overview was the Ecosystem Reserves, which signifies the restart of the token buyback plan. The buyback was originally announced last year, and shows the VeChain Foundation has faith in the longterm value of the VET token. The Ecosystem Reserve already holds 445 million tokens, or about $4.5 million USD at current prices.

**The ecosystem reserve was acquired by the VeChain Foundation on the open markets. This reserve will be used to facilitate the long term growth of the VeChain ecosystem. VeChain Foundation is evaluating institution level custody service, and the reserve will be deposited into the custody and disclosed when the custody service is available.

The full report can be read here.

VeChain’s official video contest deadline passes

After nearly a month of submissions, the window finally shut to submit new videos. There were over 80 different videos received, including dozens of well-made, professional explainers and introductions to the technology. The team must now pick between all of them and will announce 10 finalists on July 5th.

CEO Sunny Lu set to join the China-Singapore Dialogue

The event is hosted by Wanxiang Blockchain Labs and the Singapore Blockchain Association. The event will take place on June 4th at 9:30 am (UTC +8) and will be streamed live on Singapore University of Social Science’s YouTube Channel.

Cointelegraph Consulting & VeChain publish a joint food safety report

This report, entitled When Blockchain Meets IoT: Ensuring Food Safety in the 2020s, discusses how better food traceability has a lot to offer an industry plagued by a low rate of digitalization. According to the report, the benefits of IoT and blockchain are spread across three value drivers: cost reduction, revenue enhancement, and risk mitigation. Cointelegraph Consulting estimates that these savings can add up to $155 billion per year globally.

The report identifies five areas which will undergo tumultuous changes in the next ten years, including supply chain, global trade, food processing, stakeholder mindset, and food production. Blockchain and IoT are the keys to increasing transparency, trust and collaboration within the industry, empowering producers and retailers to deliver safer products for consumption around the world.

Check out the report here.

 

Sunny Lu interviewed by Digital Asset Investor (YouTube)

This week well-known cryptocurrency influencer known as Digital Asset Investor spent an hour chatting with Sunny Lu about the development of the platform. The pair touched on a few key topics including:

  • Why VeChain doesn’t use the Proof of Work consensus algorithm
  • The importance of the combining business mindsets and technical mindsets. Enterprises care about solutions, rather than just technology.
  • The misunderstandings about China “banning” blockchain and how VeChain is working on upscaling the business development in North America.
  • The busy travel life of Sunny and the importance of spending time with his family.
  • The implementation of the My Care solution in the biggest hotel from Intercontinental Group in Shanghai which is a dedicated hotel for the China International Import Expo (CIIE).

At the time of writing, the video had nearly 17k views.

DNV GL announces ArcelorMittal verified with MyCare

This massive steel conglomerate is now using MyCare to verify a UK office is compliant with infection risk management standards. DNV GL uses the blockchain to create a transparent record of their testing processes. ArcelorMittal is a global company with 191,248 employees in 18 different countries. They are one of the biggest steel companies in the world and supplies industries such as construction, automotive, energy, and transportation.

VeChainStats.com plans new site upgrades

Trusted community website vechainstats.com is planning to re-launch with a complete new website in fall 2020. According to their  Twitter post, they plan to partner with Zoomcharts to give even more visualizations and interactive analytics to the community.

Sunny Lu scheduled to speak at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) on July 10th

We reported this previously, but this is a reminder that the event will happen next weekend. The event is hosted by a group of government agencies including the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economics and Information Technology alongside strategic partners like Microsoft, AWS, China Mobile, and ICBC.

Third-Party Progress & Community Progress

OceanEx performs Q2 token burn

156,137,147 OCE were removed from the total market supply for this quarter. Each quarter, OCE tokens used to pay transaction and withdrawal fees are collected and burned. In total, over a billion have been burned since the beginning of this program four quarters ago. That’s over $2 million USD at today’s prices. Link

8 Hours announces upcoming VIMworld launch

The VIMworld gaming ecosystem is set to kick off soon, and early participants are eligible for rewards, tokens, and playable VIM characters. Read more about this here.

Jur completes upgrade and Connex integration

Legaltech solution Jur launched a new blog, and took the opportunity to announce they had upgraded their Jur Beta Platform to support Connex integration. The benefit is that the platform now runs smoothly in VeChain Sync. If you haven’t tried it, jump in and make your first legal contract today on the blockchain.

Safe Haven deploy Digital Inheritance smart contracts

Long-time VeChain project Safe Haven appears close to deploying a solution that would let users split their private key among appointed beneficiaries should they pass away. Their solution, called Inheriti, should make it easier for people to justify holding large sums of cryptocurrency without risking their family’s financial future.

Real Items holding webinar

On July 8th, Real Items will be sharing how they verify PPE products during this COVID-19 pandemic. The webinar will be held with Penrose Partners

Sign up for this free event here.

There wasn’t any announcement, but it seems Real Items has been updating their website

The VThorium rocket is here

A simple dApp that burns VTHO on the way to the moon is now collecting prizes from the community. Anyone can add a prize, which so far includes things like Veriarti tokens, NFTs, and other digital assets. Find out more or just try it out at vthorium.com

Reminder: DApps on the VeChain platform are eligible for subsidies

COO Kevin Feng tweeted this week about the VTHO subsidy program.

If you run a dapp on the VeChainThor blockchain, don’t forget to apply for our ongoing VTHO subsidy program. It helps you reduce the operational cost, acquire more users and more tx. vechain.org/bounty-program/

Kevin Feng’s Twitter

Follow our new Twitter account for the latest in news, opinions, metrics, and other wholesome information on the world of VeChain. Special thanks to @VeChainStats and @Martijncvv for help in compiling this summary.

5G8Hours FoundationAccentureAlessandro PalomboAlipayAMAAmazon AWSAmazon Web ServicesAnalysisAPACArkaneArtworkAwardAWSBaasBaiduBayerBig Data ExpoBinanceBitcoin

Buy VET at OceanEx
Buy VET at OceanEx

Latest Posts

What to expect from PoA 2.0-Surface and VeChain’s current technical advantages

What to expect from PoA 2.0-Surface and VeChain’s current technical advantages

by | News

As more companies join the ecosystem, it is increasingly important to ensure that the network can cope with high activity growth. With this in mind, VeChain is consistently improving the technology behind VeChainThor; currently developing a new consensus algorithm and having at least 42 patents around the world.

In VeChain’s 6th Bootcamp, Peter Zhou – VeChain Chief Scientist – and Zhijie (aka Max) Ren – VeChain Senior Research Scientist – addressed some of the most common questions and shared what to expect from the new PoA 2.0 – SURFACE.

 

What is PoA?

VeChainThor uses a Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus; where one of the 101 pre-approved validators (Authority Masternodes) are randomly selected to generate the next block. The model avoids computational competition and enables a faster and more efficient block production. The limited number of “miners”, however, creates centralisation concerns which, according to Peter, is a misconception. As demonstrated by him in the chart below, depending on the perspective, the presence of mining pools in other blockchains actually makes them more centralised than VeChain.

VeChainThor’s scaling solution: It’s all about quality not quantity

There are many ways to scale a blockchain network such as increasing the bandwidth, increasing the block size and/or block frequency, sharding, etc.

VeChain, however, opted to optimise bandwidth with its PoA 2.0 SURFACE (Secure Use-case-adaptive Relatively Fork-free Approach of Chain Extension) consensus.

When a new block is created, time is used in communication overheads, transmission and validation of data, and reaching a consensus to elect the next node to generate a block though. By maximising the percentage of time spent in transmitting data (blue part), more transactions can be included into the block, raising the number transactions per second (TPS) and improving bandwidth efficiency.

Consensus under PoA 1.0:

Consensus under PoA 2.0:

To reduce achieve this, PoA 2.0 proposes the following changes:

Delayed validation: instead of validating the block in the consensus round it is generated, validation is delayed to the next round. This allows the network to transmit and validate blocks simultaneously and in parallel; essentially saving time.

Epoch based random beacon scheduling: instead of deciding on “real-time” which node will generate the next block, a schedule is randomly created in advance (for example one day beforehand) to decide which, and in which order, Authority Masternodes will produce new blocks. This eliminates the time wasted in reaching a consensus every time a block is created.

Relatively fork-free approach: when a new block is generated, it takes time for the block data to reach the Authority Masternodes. Since Masternodes are kept in different locations, they receive the information at different times. By removing block validation and the consensus process from the “round”, the new data doesn’t have enough time to fully propagate, leading to asynchrony problems between nodes and giving the chance for a malicious player to fork the chain and double spend. To avoid this, PoA 2.0 introduces a verifiable random function (VRF) mechanism whereby blocks need to be endorsed by a randomly selected smaller pool of Authority Masternodes to be confirmed. This helps dilute the power of the singular Authority Masternode creating the new block and can potentially reduce the probability of malicious forks to 1%.

To find out more about PoA2.0 SURFACE visit VeChain’s Medium announcement and the preprint paper. 

A business perspective of VeChainThor

 

Many businesses have moved away from Ethereum onto VeChainThor, including Deloitte, Fresh Supply Co and Real Items.

During VeChain’s 7th webinar, Ken Woodruff -co-founder and CTO of Real Items- shared the main advantages VeChainThor brings to his firm.

 

What is Real Items

Real Items aims to bridge the gap between blockchain and consumers, focusing on easy user onboarding and usability. To this goal, they have created VeChainThor integrations for some of the most popular online platforms, such as Shopify and HubSpot, and are currently developing new WeChat, WooCommerce (WordPress) and DeFi enabled supply chain management solutions.

 

VeChainThor’s competitive advantage for enterprises

For Ken, some of the main benefits of building in VeChainThor are:

  • Two-token VET/VTHO model – helps to keep stable and predictable fees (essential to forecast and manage business risks)
  • Multi-Task Transaction (MTT) – allows the ordering and bundling of item creation into one transaction. Simplifying the process and reducing transaction costs
  • Fee delegation – enables sponsors to pay for transfers fees on behalf of users, avoiding customers having to manage cryptocurrencies (vital for enterprise adoption). Currently, fee delation is used in more than 90% of clauses
  • Fixed 101 Authority Masternodes – leads to consistent and predictable block time (10s), allows faster sync between nodes and allows quicker core feature development cycles and hardware and software network updates
  • Solid APIs – ability to work with easier Connect and JAVA API
  • Easy access to VeChain core dev team – allows developers to readily receive technical support when needed
  • VeChain Foundation backing – financial support from the foundation in the form of VTHO donations when milestones are achieved

Percentage of fee delegation clauses in the last 10 days. Credit to VeChainStats.com

VeChain prides itself for being the leading enterprise blockchain platform and businesses are at the core of its innovations. With an ambitious goal to drive mass adoption, it’s great to see that them back their words with actions and have enterprises validate its business friendly ecosystem.

5G8Hours FoundationAccentureAlessandro PalomboAlipayAMAAmazon AWSAmazon Web ServicesAnalysisAPACArkaneArtworkAwardAWSBaasBaiduBayerBig Data ExpoBinanceBitcoin

Buy VET at OceanEx
Buy VET at OceanEx

Latest Posts

Weekly Roundup – February 28

by | News

One of those weeks where covering the VeChain ecosystem was like a box of chocolates…

Major Update: PoA 2.0 – SURFACE

Two of the brightest minds at VeChain – Chief Scientist Peter Zhou (PhD University of Southampton) and Senior Researcher Ren Zhijie (postdoc and PhD at TU Delft) put together a 21 page preprint on their new consensus algorithm, named SURFACE. If you aren’t a very technical person, don’t bother reading it, you won’t get very far. In layman’s terms, the main updates are to increase:

  • role determination and rules (to prevent attacks),
  • throughput (traffic that can pass through),
  • latency (speed of response),
  • finality (speed of block confirmation).

This combination of speed, scalability and security makes up the Holy Trinity of what a blockchain needs to perform efficiently. VeChain’s continued attention to this is necessary to keep pace with the rapid speed of R&D in the blockchain world. The full preprint is posted here: Link

DNV GL and VeChain’s Low-Carbon Ecosystem 2.0 (China) Webpage Released

With the launch of a new website, the initiative focuses around environmental protection and public welfare, two popular issues that blockchain has been tipped to solve in China. They aim to unite users, merchants, enterprises, and government organizations for charitable and sustainable initiatives. Right now, the goal seems to be focused on adding more enterprises willing to support the ecosystem. Read more about the award-winning initiatives here.

Real Items Marketplace Released

Authenticity-as-a-Service platform Real Items released a marketplace for blockchain verified items. This marketplace is meant to “demo” the capabilities of NFTs in products as they look to add more clients.

The products, including this VeChain101 shirt, all feature a 2FA QR code directly on the product. By entering the pin into the landing page, buyers can claim their items and connect with the brands behind the goods.

DNV GL speaks at the GSFI Conference in Seattle

The Global Food Safety Initiative event was a chance for DNV GL’s CEO of Business Assurance Luca Crisciotti to speak about My Story being used to track food products on the blockchain. In addition to wine makers Ricci Curbastro, Ruffino and Torrevento, two new logos were present. They were Buondioli, Italian olive oil producer, and La Fiammante, Italian tomato and canned vegetable producer. My Story is a blockchain solution to add transparency to supply chains.

https://twitter.com/DNVGL_Assurance/status/1233336657304313861?s=20

Chinese Media Blockbeats Features VeChain

The article, entitled What’s Next For Blockchain In The Post-Internet Age? was an in-depth look at how VeChain was challenging decentralization narratives in the industry to build a hybrid model that actually fits into business scenarios. It was picked up by major news portals including Tencent, Sina Weibo News, and many others.

You can view a translated version here: Link

Fashion Designer Sarah Regensburger adds VeChain to Collection

ToolChain showed its appeal to independent designers by popping up at Paris Fashion Week. Check the video in the Twitter post for more.

https://twitter.com/mikefrancesc0/status/1233360709863514112?s=20

Browser Plugins Galore

After the Totient revealed Comet would no longer be updated, an active group of community members decided to “crowdfund” development of a Google Chrome Wallet plugin, allowing users to interact with dApps from the comfort of their usual web browser.

Their efforts were successful, as they reached their target and announced a Ukrainian development team was preparing to undertake the task of creating the plugin, similar to Metamask for Ethereum.

A few days later, ecosystem project Safe Haven announced that they were purchasing the original plugin, Comet, with the intention of making it open-source and furthering development. This gives the community two potential browser plugins, as well as the return of the NFT marketplace Cometverse.

Blockbabies Registration Set to Open on March 5th

“Decentralized infant chaos” is descending on VeChain, thanks to the Blockbabies early bird registration announcement. The game will have NFT babies face-off in a “Baby Battle Arena” with a concept that is as both eye-catching as it is original.

Exchange Updates

OceanEx Telegram AMA

OceanEx’s CEO Nan Xiaoning responded to the dipping OCE token price by reassuring the community that the team was working hard to increase the token price. Nan took on hard hitting topics including issues with trading bots and token price, which can be read about here.

We would like to explore more practical OCE use cases for all OCE holders. For example, we are connecting with a crypto game company, to list our OCE as utility token in the online game. With OCE you could play a lot of fun games. Another idea is to create our OceanEx merch online store. Our supporters will have a chance to buy our tailored merch by using OCE. We are also looking for more third-party companies to form the cooperation to add more value and applications for our platform token. There is a lot more to be explored in the OCE use cases.

Cream Partners with Bitrue

Long a favorite of the XRP community, Bitrue reached a deal with Cream to offer benefits to VeChain ecosystem projects. This includes staking benefits for holders, as well as a way to list more VIP180 projects.

SNKr Announces IEO with Bitmart

Streetwear Ecosystem SNKr announced on March 4th they would hold their initial token sale on Bitmart. This Shanghai based project is partnered with streetwear event INNERSECT and has a BaaS platform and consumer app, known as Mine.

Return of Transactions

The mainnet lit up on Thursday and Friday with a wave of new transactions. The ToolChain contract, suspected as being linked to the Yunnan Tea partnership (source: Reddit) blew through yearly highs and set some optimism back in the ecosystem.

Vexplorer.io

Users watching the explosion on real-time blockchain visualizer vechainuniverse.com were treated to a wave of fireworks and sounds, capping off a busy week in the world of VeChain. Special nod to reddit user Thesandiegonite for vechainuniverse.com.

5G8Hours FoundationAccentureAlessandro PalomboAlipayAMAAmazon AWSAmazon Web ServicesAnalysisAPACArkaneArtworkAwardAWSBaasBaiduBayerBig Data ExpoBinanceBitcoin

Buy VET at OceanEx
Buy VET at OceanEx

Latest Posts

First-of-its-kind marketplace added to Real Items

by | News

Over the past weekend (February 22), Real Items launched their NFT-backed marketplace, to sell verified items directly to consumers. The marketplace featured a number of retail items, including a popular mug with a QR code linked to its transaction on the VeChain mainnet.

The marketplace is not the main business model for Real Items. Instead, it is meant to serve as a demo of what other businesses could provide customers as part of Real Items growing Software-as-a-Service offering: Real Items built the infrastructure to put a company’s goods on the (VeChain) blockchain, as well as provides end users with landing pages and media to educate shoppers about the goods they are buying. After purchasing, buyers can input a single use 2FA pin to claim the item, giving them additional functionality down the road, and providing sellers more insights on their marketshare. When the item is claimed, a second transaction occurs, transferring ownership to the customer.

The Real items application suite leverages VeChain’s built in fee delegation to sponsor initial transactions so users aren’t required to be familiar with blockchain or VET.  Their solution removes the need for brands to dive into every nuance of blockchain technology so they can integrate in a matter of minutes opposed to months.  Their cloud platform uses VeChain’s MPP (Multi-party payment) saving shop owners and customers from the complexities of blockchain transactions.

Real Items is currently building an enterprise sales team to push this model into more mainstream areas. However, one area they are committed to working with is helping out with charities and sustainable organizations. Higher traceability and customer confidence makes shoppers more likely to support these initiatives, and Real Items can do a lot in this regard.

An example of Real Items supporting charitable initiatives

Real Items makes it easy for sellers to get involved. Using the Real Items Shopify app, sellers can instantly link their webstore products and print out labels with 2FA-QR codes or send the NFTs direct to a customer’s real items account after a purchase.  This eliminates the need for consumers to have a wallet.  Their assumption is that most users will treat their digital certificates (NFTs) like Bitcoin on Coinbase, making personal custody the last option they choose.

Also in the marketplace was an original VeChain101 design. The design is a nod to VeChain’s ties to Shanghai, where the blockchain began, and their original use case verifying supply chains. It features a container ship on the the historic Huangpu River, with The Oriental Pearl TV Tower, the Shanghai Tower, and the Shanghai World Financial Center forming the backdrop.

For more information, check out their website at realitems.io.

5G8Hours FoundationAccentureAlessandro PalomboAlipayAMAAmazon AWSAmazon Web ServicesAnalysisAPACArkaneArtworkAwardAWSBaasBaiduBayerBig Data ExpoBinanceBitcoin

Buy VET at OceanEx
Buy VET at OceanEx

Latest Posts

Vetcast #15 – Real Items Co-founders Join the Vetcast

by | Podcasts

Host Ben Yorke of Vechain101.com talks with Real Items co-founders David and Ken about their application suite built on VeChain. Real Items has had a busy start to 2020, led by the announcement of their integration with Shopify. Listen in to hear their vision for the company as the year begins to unfold.

5G8Hours FoundationAccentureAlessandro PalomboAlipayAMAAmazon AWSAmazon Web ServicesAnalysisAPACArkaneArtworkAwardAWSBaasBaiduBayerBig Data ExpoBinanceBitcoin

Buy VET at OceanEx
Buy VET at OceanEx

Latest Posts