VeChain x Crypto Miners AMA Recap, Feat. SEA General Manager, Sarah Nabaa
Recently, the VeChain Foundation’s General Manager for South East Asia, Sarah Nabaa, gave an informative AMA to the Crypto Miners Telegram community.
We’ve collated and condensed Sarah’s answers below for your reading pleasure. There were some exciting tidbits included. Enjoy!
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Introductory conversation omitted for brevity —
1) Can you please give a brief explanation about what ‘VeChainThor’ is? What inspired your team to create this blockchain platform and what are its ambitions for the longer term?
VeChainThor is the name of the blockchain launched by the VeChain Foundation in 2018. We built many of its features specifically to address problems Ethereum faces, for example, scaling and usage costs. We built the world’s first enterprise-grade layer one public blockchain designed from the bottom up to enable real world applications and we have worked with many major companies on applications with very positive feedback.
The VeChain project was founded by Sunny Lu and Jay Zhang in 2015, it aims to close the trust gap between parties, enabling better collaboration and eliminating opaqueness in the new data economy. In an interconnected world, trust in data will be critical. Blockchain technology allows companies to view each other’s data in a transparent way and opens up many new kinds of services, business models and interesting concepts such as circular economics.
When I first met the team in 2017, they were already working on several key enterprise contracts –4 of which I wish to highlight: Givenchy, D.I.G(Shanghai), Renault Groupe and DNV GL (now called DNV). The use-cases were anti-counterfeiting in luxury goods and wine, innovation in smart automobile passports and certification, this quickly expanded into other industries such as Food Safety and Sustainability, with the support of VeChain’s 2 strategic business partners — PwC and DNV.
Being on the ground and dealing with enterprise partners, there were a lot of challenges being an ERC20 token (VEN) faced by enterprise companies. For example: CFOs will ask “how much would 10,000 txns cost” but no one could give an answer as the transaction prices were dependent on the value of ETH, which fluctuated a lot.
In terms of scalability, ETH’s network architecture also posed an issue. In the long run, we aim to deliver huge volumes of transactions which was not possible on ETH. This spurred the founders to build and create their very own blockchain — VeChainThor — with its own token (VET) in 2018, something I found very commendable.
Ambitions for the longer term: VeChainThor has shown it is not afraid to forge its own path in a huge and fast-growing industry full of hype and copycats. We have many unique technical features at the protocol layer that set us far apart from other blockchains. With our new European Tech Center, you can expect us to continuously upgrade our existing technologies and improve the base layer protocol with many more tools to improve the developer experience.
With VeChain Tech focused on growing and expanding enterprise and business use cases, we hope to attract more community members and start-ups via the VeChain Foundation with Startup Grants, new tooling, hackathons and other initiatives.
Most importantly, we are building services and tools to support the implementation of the UN’s 17 Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) relating to Sustainability and well-being of humanity as a core focus for 2022 and the next 5 years. This is a huge area for development and blockchain is the perfect tool.
2) What are the main features and advantages of your technologies that set you apart from other projects/blockchains? Are there any unique technologies that could benefit the entire blockchain space?
Main technical features of our protocol that is friendly to developers:
Firstly, VeChainThor (VET) is a smart contract platform that is EVM compatible making building easier for devs looking to create or port existing projects across.
VeChainThor was built from bottom up to take blockchain to the real economy and allow the world to make use of it. The team had identified some crucial hurdles for enterprise adoption when it was an ERC20 token between 2015–2017 and designed VeChainThor (VET) with its unique features to overcome those challenges, ensuring it was extremely secure, fast and scalable.
Consensus Mechanism — Proof-of-Authority, validated by 101 global whitelisted masternodes.
We chose POA because it’s a very secure and fast protocol, but we are in the process of making it substantially better.
Back in June, our chief scientist — Dr Peter Zhou — announced the first phase of POA2.0 had gone live on a private test net — with POA 2.0 we introduce finality, a technology that guarantees data security.
With POA2.0, we combine the strengths of the 2 most common consensus types and eliminate their weaknesses, making VeChainThor the most advanced, secure and not to mention, greenest blockchain in the market.
Sustainability is a core focus for VeChain — running the VeChainThor network for an entire year is the equivalent of mining 2.4% of 1 Bitcoin, approx. 51 ETH transactions. This makes us the ideal starting point for enterprises looking to build blockchain applications who are now sharply focused on SDG and sustainability objectives. Energy consumption is an important factor.
Fee delegation — this allows transactions costs to be handled by a third party or smart contract.
When a user uses a dApp, they no longer need to hold crypto to pay for transactions or smart contracts. It means the target audience is no longer limited to cryptoasset owners allowing wholesale mass adoption. Blockchain must be able to operate as seamlessly as the internet for it to be truly adopted.
Companies can issue enterprise NFTs on VeChain, in the form of tickets and collectibles without consumers needing to own crypto tokens and the companies themselves can pay in their local currency and simply use the blockchain, with a smart contract paying their gas fees for them.
Advanced transaction batching — Developers can send many Transactions at once, batching them up nicely in the order they want, efficiently and at a low cost. This is very important for huge clients, for example Walmart China, who package many kinds of items at once.
VeChain’s 2 token model — Each VET token generates 0.00432 VTHO every day, meaning users never have to expend VET to use the network — a problem with ETH. This model was designed to keep transaction costs stable — if VTHO goes up in value, we can reduce the gas required for a transaction. It’s a very elegant solution to one of the biggest problems in blockchain. And because of our POA consensus mechanism, we don’t have an issue where users have to bid and overpay the network to create a Transaction.
Lastly, ZERO downtime since Genesis! VeChainThor is a very robust network and it has to be for real world adoption. We have delivered 100% uptime so far.
3) VeChainThor is enabling mass adoption of blockchain technology. How has the team’s real world experience translated when it comes to working with enterprises? Do they understand the value-add of the technology beyond decentralized finance?
Since inception, VeChain has always differentiated itself from others with its numerous real-world enterprise use-cases.
Co-founders have legit background and experiences:
Sunny Lu — technical background, was former Chief Information Officer of LVMH China.
Jay — former PwC and Deloitte
The VeChain Tech team — mostly behind the scenes, have biz dev, technology and consulting background, they focus on helping companies integrate VeChain ToolChain into Proof of Concepts and beyond and build using technologies developed built by the VeChain Foundation.
The VeChain Tech won special mention at the LVMH innovation Awards back in 2018, partnered BMW via BMW Startup Garage and worked with Bayer China on clinical trial data collection through a platform called ‘C-Secure’.
The Foundation is supported by 2 strategic and major global business partners — PwC and DNV.
These 2 companies are like big brothers, they open doors to opportunities, while our team does our thing behind the scenes — support them in presentations, proposals and tech implementation.
VeChain ToolChain is constantly going through new iterations, it has helped enterprises implement product traceability, proof of authenticity, more recently tracking carbon emissions in the supply chain and with the launch of VeUSD, there is potential to expand into supply chain finance as well.
A list of Notable Clientele: Walmart China, COS under the H&M group, the BMW Innovation team, Givenchy under the LVMH portfolio, Frank and Oak, Reebonz, etc
Here’s a community site that contains an oversight of our partnerships: https://vechainvefam.com/ecosystem/
4) Let’s talk about your native tokens VET and VTHO. What are the utilities of VET & VTHO in Your Ecosystem and how do they differentiate from the tokenomics of other large projects?
The VET token is the Store of Value, can be used for on-chain payment and it generates the Gas token.
VTHO is used to pay for gas fees. 70% are Burned upon use. 30% is paid as rewards to the Authority Masternode that mined the last block.
In our token model, our network creates network value through use. With large Transaction volumes, comes large demand for VTHO. This demand stimulates demand from the open market, where VTHO is bought, helping create value for both VTHO and VET.
In the years ahead, as blockchain becomes ubiquitous and embedded into all areas of life, you can imagine the kinds of transaction volumes that will come — billions across the world each year — just as billions of search requests or data points are generated from the internet. I think many fail to grasp just how important blockchain will be for the future of the global economy and its industries.
5) How long has it taken to develop this project? What is VeChainThor’s roadmap for the future? Are there any exciting developments for the project underway?
It has been 4 years since we launched VeChainThor.
Roadmap:
For the VeChain Foundation
1. Expect POA2.0 upgrade in October 2022, followed by a Steering Committee Election in 2022. The community will vote on our new Steering Committee members for the VeChain Foundation.
2. New HQ, Technology Center and Business Center opened in Europe — Technology Center in Ireland, Business Center in Milan, HQ in San Marino. This will help us massively accelerate our global adoption.
3. Our new CTO, Antonio Senatore, shared a lot on his last stream with Finstreet about the development roadmap his team is working on. They will focus on building new tools: a plug-in wallet, new IDEs and libraries etc to improve the developer experience on VeChainThor.
4. VeChain Foundation is very transparent and publishes its financial executive report every quarter on Twitter. We’ve set aside a huge budget on marketing, you must have heard about our 5 year partnership with UFC, next to follow is we intend to work with industry experts in terms of setting new standards in sustainability and also working on the nitty gritty stuff like websites and marketing materials.
5. For VeChain Technology — a separate business entity that builds using VeChain Foundation technology — I must admit that COVID really forced many companies to re-calibrate their priorities, but now that the pandemic is under control, VeChain Technology is rapidly expanding in Europe with a key focus on growing its use cases in sustainability, provenance and carbon tracking, with many more industries targeted such as energy, medicine, provenance etc.
Twitter AMA questions:
@_C_R_Y_P_T_O:
- Is PoA 2.0 official release on Mainnet still scheduled according to plan? Targeting month of October 2022?
Yes, that’s correct.
2. Is #VeChain $VET still working on listing their token on Coinbase and other exchanges?
Discussions with Coinbase are under NDA, however I can confirm we are actively talking with them still.
3. Are we going to see more transactions on VeChainThor?
Of course — from both community developers and Businesses. The world is moving toward blockchain-based systems. There is massive scope for growth in the years ahead!
@Xmen1
Almost 4/5 of investors are focused purely on the price of token in short term instead of understanding the real value and health of the project. Could you tell us on motivations and benefits for investors to hold your token in long term?
Sarah:
Sure, if you’ve been invested in crypto in the past 5 years, and you had a taste of the previous crypto winter, you would look for projects with real utility — VeChain is one of the few projects that is trusted by Giants and has delivered time and time again. We built a network where value grows from network effects and utility.
Financially — the VeChain Foundation is doing well, it has a large Treasury and provide full transparency with quarterly financial reporting.
VeChainThor protocol has been accredited in multiple ways:
- The first & only approved 5-Star Blockchain Service Provider by TÜV Saarland
- Certified as an eco-friendly blockchain by CTI certification
Pre-COVID: VeChain’s technology was gaining momentum with enterprise use-cases in anticounterfeiting, food safety, automobile, manufacturing, and sustainability.
During COVID: There was a pause on enterprise use-cases as companies had to recalibrate on priorities and reign in research and new technology spending. However, that phase is now returning to ‘normal’.
Post Covid:
1. Back in Jan’22, We launched our own regulated stablecoin $VeUSD together with Stably.io to support DeFi/TradeFi use-cases.
2. Most recently, Supply@ME (a listed company on LDN stock exchange) received $10M in support to build its first inventory monetization system on the VeChainThor Blockchain using NFTs and DeFi.
3. Marketing and building aggressively — Global multi-year UFC partnership with 900million household reach and many marketing initiatives to come, a new HQ set up in Italy and technical centre based out of Ireland to build tools and to support the VeChainThor ecosystem.
4. Building the Virtual Economy — huge emphasis on DeFi/TradeFi/GameFi/NFT applications etc
New VeFam members wish to see more DeFi projects, which was missing on VeChainThor, that’s another reason we are building new tools and providing initiatives for developers to build and provide those kinds of solutions on VET.
@HiramonPakhi
VeChain has had 4 years of effective operation. But the current situation of the cryptocurrency market is still very bad. In addition, due to the impact of the pandemic, financial inflation increased. So, how will this impact VeChain’s strategy and Operations?
Sarah:
The pandemic has created many new opportunities and accelerated the need for new digital technologies — especially in areas such as supply chain.
The state of the crypto market at large has no effect on our ability to operate as we have taken many steps to secure the operations of the Foundation — we have a significant Treasury with funds to operate for many years ahead.
Strategically, we must always be ready to adapt and of course the pandemic affected certain aspects of our development — but with the world opening up again and our expansion into Europe, we are very confident about the next 5 years of our growth.
@stiv98713
In light of the $UST collapse, the VeChain team has opted to launch VeUSD. How will you solve problems associated with algorithmic stablecoins? How secured is it against any crash?
Sarah:
VeUSD is not an algorithmic stablecoin — it is fully backed 1:1 by real US dollars, held by a chartered company in the USA with accounts monitored by relevant financial authorities.
It is secured against crashing because each token is backed by a dollar — you will never not be able to sell your VeUSD for a dollar as a result. For UST, there was no such backing and nothing to protect it from collapse, it relied on a growing market and a positive feedback loop between LUNA and UST.
@Him24443858Him
As a smart investor, I choose a project with promising potential seen from tokenomic, good experienced team, clear roadmap, project that makes sense. My question is do you have all of them, and where can I find details about it?
Sarah:
We do have them — hopefully my answers above help all of your points! We have a solid plan for our next 5 years, including massively expanding our tech team, tool kits, the blockchain itself and of course, continuing to work with our expansive list of partners and channel partners — we have 300 enterprise clients currently based on the latest numbers from Antonio and many more inquiries incoming often. These use case will continue to mature to larger and larger scale as the world adopts blockchain en masse. With global regulations starting to unfold, VeChainThor is well positioned to thrive in this new digital economy.
Telegram AMA Questions:
Q1:
VeChain and the UFC have formed a historic global partnership.
What part will this collaboration play in the long-term success of the project? Kindly tell us the benefits and potential outcomes of this partnership.
How can these two parties contribute to each other?
A:
As you know, The partnership with the UFC is a major global marketing deal. The UFC have tremendous global reach, a rapidly growing audience and are spreading across Europe and Asia. There is currently 900 million household viewership, and the numbers keep growing. In terms of benefits — the exposure for VeChain is colossal, this is of course a huge benefit.
The community demographics of VeChain and the UFC are very aligned — young, entrepreneurial, generally well-off and many business-like people. This greatly helps our networking & messaging reach.
For the UFC — we are working on some interesting technical implementations — they will be able to benefit from our technology directly too. More details on that will come in the future.
The outcome is greater exposure and community growth for both parties. VeChain is a powerful layer one blockchain solving major problems in the current data structure of the global economy. They are helping us spread awareness and our messages beyond our traditional circles and have stated in press releases they are very proud to work alongside us.
Q2:
Can you tell us some of the projects being handled by VeChainThor Blockchain and how they will impact the world we live in?
A:
Of course! As many probably know, VeChainThor has done a lot of work in supply chain, but this is just one of many use cases the network can manage. In fact, the use cases are only limited by the imaginations of the developers building them.
For supply chain in the food and beverage sector — we have been able to work with food producers = to use IoT devices to gather data from the very start of the lifecycle of a product soil PH/growing conditions, packaging location, logistics trails and whether the item was transported at the right temperature, all the way to the shop floor. They can also record things like the energy usage of the farming process to allow consumers to choose sustainable/low carbon products. This data is verified by quality assurance company like DNV before it’s published on blockchain and shared with consumers.
With Walmart China, VeChain ToolChain was implemented for the purpose of traceability and showing customers their efforts in food safety and investment in cold chain logistics, instead of having to wait 3 months for a Proof of Concept, VeChain ToolChain enabled Walmart China to start a PoC in 3 weeks, saving them time and showing results. This use case quickly expanded to Sam’s Club, another members-only subsidiary of Walmart China.
Benefits? Well, for one, if food spoils in transit, the logistics company can be identified and held accountable. A supplier can now prove they delivered a good to the next stage of the supply chain and be paid in hours vs a month or so. For customers, they can now view the entire trail and know a products lifecycle, is it legitimate, is it truly ethically sourced, is it carbon neutral. They could even tip a coffee farmer, for example, directly if they like their products and support small businesses. The potential of the technology is tremendous.
Outside of supply chain, we worked with luxury goods manufacturers who use our encrypted chips embedded in their products — they can create an NFT of a luxury item, pair it with our in-house NFC technology and create ‘phygital’ (physical + digital) merchandise. This allows second hand sellers to know if a product is legit. It also allows luxury companies to see the lifecycle of their products, where before it was impossible. It also helps preserve the value of the item.
We also work in carbon management, recording data, verified by our major channel partner DNV, the allow major brands to reduce their carbon footprints in a recorded and trustless way and demonstrate their actions to regulators. COS groupe piloted a circular use-case, proving to consumers the production of a zero-waste sweater by following the waste materials to other factories and having it re-spun and re-colored to produce other products.
Globally, governments are introducing things like carbon credit marketplaces and carbon pricing — blockchain technology is the tool that allows accurate recording and VeCarbon — another tech company that uses VeChain foundation technology — is building those kinds of solutions. We of course intend to roll out the tech in Europe too.
Q3:
For the Proof of Authority feature on your platform are there requirements an individual must possess before he can apply to be a Masternode operator?
A:
Yes, there are actually! We have clearly defined criteria for operating a masternode. It’s a resource I don’t think many people know exist.
You can find it here: https://www.vechain.org/authority-masternode-handbook/
And while you’re there, check out our website! We have tons of info about grants, foundation programs, news and all kinds of information related to the VeChain Foundation.
Q4:
How many Social Media do you have? I mean
1. Telegram
2. YouTube
3. Medium
4. Website
5. Twitter
6. Discord
7. TikTok
8. Instagram
You can share with us the link for your project in all these projects?
A:
Of course! Make sure you go follow them right away to stay up to date with news, jobs, community stuff and more!
1. Telegram: https://t.me/vechain_official_english
2. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqKEWPu5hkEl4o3sxlj3N5A
3. Medium: https://vechainofficial.medium.com/
4. Website: https://www.vechain.org/
5. Twitter: https://twitter.com/vechainofficial
6. Discord: https://www.discord.gg/vechain
7. TikTok: — n/a
8. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vechainfoundation_official/
9. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vechain-foundation/
Q5:
Last year — VeChain community has been building a lot of projects and a whole NFT revolution happened.
Do you have anything you want to say or mention to the community building on VeChainThor?
A:
VeChainThor was launched as a fully programmable layer one blockchain, just like Ethereum, but we had a slower start on the community developer front as many only thought of our project as supply chain. Many didn’t understand what the network was built to achieve — AKA, anything and everything. We see those tides are turning, and we will continue to increase marketing and outreach to help the whole crypto space understand our vision and mission.
I am thrilled to see the impressive growth on the community developer front and watch the Foundation’s tools and tech being put to great use. We want to support the community with grants and tooling and we are working on improving all of them with our growth plans in Europe — 100 new Foundation devs over 3 years — we are going to be building hard. We will continue to sponsor hackathons to help drive more growth there too.
To the community, we see your creative genius and we love it. From building excellent NFT marketplaces (popular examples being WorldofV, VeSea, BlackVeMarket) to the exceptional data aggregator platform that is VeChainStats who have helped us a great deal in many ways. We have excellent tool builders like vechain.energy and We see the emergence of DeFi platforms such as Vexchange and VeRocket, with new ones in development. We recently crossed 500,000 NFTs minted by community projects on VeChain and that’s an incredible milestone.
VeFam: we heard you, and we will be pouring many more resources in to providing you the best developer environment possible in the coming years. In the meanwhile, let’s continue to spread the word — VeChainThor is here for all your needs and taking blockchain to the real world!
It’s going to be the best place to be when mass adoption takes off!
About VeChainThor Community
VeChainThor Community is here to share news, opinions and updates about VeChain and provide unique insights in to their activities. As the leader in real world adoption and with the mass adoption of blockchain now an inevitability, VeChain is entering an exciting phase in its life — one we will here to report on each step of the way!
Developers: Want to build on the leading enterprise public blockchain? Apply for up to $30,000 in grant money: https://vechain.org/grant-program/ Be sure to check out the VeChain Developer ‘Awesome List’ for dev resources and guidance! https://t.co/vQ9KH7esQS
Businesses: Want to get started with VeChain’s ToolChain programme and digitise your own business? Talk to the team here: https://www.vechain.com/product/toolchain
Community: Be sure to follow @VeChainThorCom on both Medium and Twitter to stay up to date on the latest and greatest from VeChain!
