Vechain Foundation Tech Update Series — October 2023
In the ever-evolving world of blockchain technology, vechain’s approach to real-world adoption continues to garner growing interest.
The teams at our European Technology Centre are working hard adapting and evolving the best technical solutions from across the crypto-sphere to provide the best toolset possible for enterprises and developers. Meanwhile, we continue to push ahead developing innovative tools of our own, such as VORJ, our no-code, no-cost Web3 as a Service digital asset platform.
In a recent video interview with Cheeky Crypto, CTO Antonio Senatore goes into great depths about a day in the life of the man running vechain’s new Technology Centre. Check it out!
If you missed our last tech update, catch up here. Let’s dive into the meat of the proverbial sandwich and see what the team at vechain have been up to!
Services
VORJ — Web3-as-a-Service Platform Updates
- IFPS integration for NFTs
- Tokenized vaults via ERC-4626
- New ERC-721 NFT creation flows
- Roles Based Access Controls (RBAC)
And work continues at a rapid pace! Since then we’ve been working on:
World of V Direct NFT Marketplace Integration
With a direct integration with World of V, a leading marketplace on the VechainThor blockchain, users can now create, deploy, mint and list their collection all through VORJ.
If your marketplace is interested in integrating with VORJ — reach out to our team on Discord!
VORJ Account Limit Upgrades
We’ve increased the free plan limits of VORJ to give users more freedom to create, explore and play with our Web3-as-a-Service toolkits.
One-Click DAO Deployment through VORJ
A new feature that is currently in testing is the ability to create Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) smart contracts through VORJ. This is a monumental step towards an era of autonomy on VechainThor.
This feature opens up endless possibilities for creating decentralized applications and fostering business and community-driven initiatives on our blockchain, with new tokenomics structures and management opportunities opening up as a result.
We’re keeping our Product Lead in the basement to work on this one day and night.
Claimable Extension to ERC-721 (NFT)
Another feature that is currently being tested is extending the NFT contract with an optional claimable event. With this update, we’re allowing VORJ-deployed NFTs to be freely claimable without requiring the contract owner’s permission.
In doing so, business and community ecosystems can create open-ended mint/claim events, making VORJ an ever-more user-friendly and versatile tool for adoption.
Marketplace-as-a-Service (MaaS)
MaaS, our white label marketplace product, aims to simplify how businesses and the community can build and deploy bespoke marketplaces on VechainThor, notably, in relation to our Blockchain Biosphere concept, developed with Boston Consulting Group.
Development continues in earnest, with front-end flows and the back-end dev environment currently under construction.
Wallets
VeWorld Mobile goes live
VeWorld, a core aspect of our new technical infrastructure, went live across App Stores in the past few weeks You can find VeWorld for your preferred device here.
At launch, VeWorld mobile features a more simplified UI, including VET/VTHO price charts, and the ability to change your currency of preference. It includes a native NFT viewer, allowing users to view any collections, rewards or otherwise in one easily-accessible location.
The roadmap for VeWorld is packed, with a fiat gateway with a major global exchange shortly ready to go-live.
In the near future, following community feedback, we’ll also be adding keystore and private key import functions, and providing a VeWorld dAppkit to help projects and users integrate VeWorld with a single line of code. We’re also integrating Ledger support via WalletConnect, ensuring users can manage their funds in their preferred ways.
Other novel features include fee delegation, allowing you to elect a separate address to sponsor transaction fees for you, offering more versatility in how you manage transactions on VechainThor.
Ledger Live Integration
Integrating with Ledger Live not only enhances our current user base experience but opens up vechain assets to an entirely new world of users through Ledger Live itself. All the work is now complete on vechain’s side as our PR has been merged with the Ledger Live repo. With some final QA tests on Ledger’s side being worked on, integration is very close.
We are excited to share that we are also being integrated into Coinify’s trading platform, allowing Ledger Live’s user base to acquire VET tokens directly through the platform via the buy feature. We continue to push ahead with our mission of ensuring the VechainThor blockchain is as open and accessible for as many users as possible.
Developer Ecosystem/Tools
Vechain Docs Revamp
Documentation is the backbone of any blockchain platform’s success. Our commitment to providing comprehensive tutorial documentation is a key to our mission of onboarding the next billion Web2 users to blockchain, necessitating user friendly, simple and intuitive guidance.
We’ve greatly streamlined the documentation user journey, telling the story of blockchain and vechain, before leading developers on to resources, SDKs, grants and more.
Check them out here!
Open-Sourced Documentation
While the Foundation team is growing larger by the month, we intend to welcome contributions from our talented community developers too.
Accordingly, we open sourced our developer documentation, allowing developers from the community to propose changes, or submit new elements themselves.
In-keeping with this theme of invitations from outside the Foundation, we recently launched a $100k community developer Vechain Improvement Proposal (VIP) campaign, as well as a builder-dedicated forum, Discourse.
On Discourse, vechain and community developers can review, comment and collaborate on VIPs and ways to improve the VechainThor protocol.
We continue our commitments towards open-sourcing all areas of VechainThor, actively encouraging contributions with direct incentives for good ideas.
Account Abstraction (EIP 4337)
We’re working to implement Account Abstraction (EIP 4337) on-chain to offer a much greater deal of versatility for builders on VechainThor, and ensure alignment with leading blockchains.
Account abstraction enhances the functionality of existing smart contract wallets, which make blockchain accounts programmable. The name, account abstraction, refers to the logic of removing the signing of transactions from the account and abstracting it out. Smart contract wallets offer a better user experience and improved security. Smart contract wallets are expected to be the approach for normalising and onboarding vast amounts of users from Web2 into Web3.
As always, the technical team continues to evaluate the most promising emerging technologies to incorporate to VechainThor, and provide the most versatile Layer 1 for business and individual use.
Brand New SDK for Seamless Development Environment
A Software Development Kit (SDK) is a core piece of technical infrastructure for any developer looking to develop technical solutions. To streamline our current Thor-DevKit/Connex SDK, we have begun the process of rebuilding it into a more simple and intuitive format.
The new SDK — dubbed simply, the ‘vechain SDK’, will combine Thor-DevKit/Connex, providing examples, tutorials and sample dApps to improve the user experience for developers or businesses building on the VechainThor blockchain.
Simplifying the development process is crucial for attracting more developers to the vechain ecosystem. As our sustainability ecosystem approach scales, these tools will be crucial for independent, seamless development.
New Node Rewards dApp Launches
The testing phase of the Rewards dApp was a great success, and we’ve quietly added the ability to sign in and claim your node rewards!
As well as greatly overhauling the UI, you can now view historical claims, total VTHO generation and other metrics. Looking ahead, we will be integrating a node marketplace directly, and adding the ability to upgrade your nodes from one easy location.
With this new piece of bespoke infrastructure deployed, we gain the option to additional new features and functions in the future relevant for our 2024 technical roadmap.
Building The Future of Web3
A fast-growing team, and a fast-growing technical ecosystem — vechain is gearing up for a full-force assault on bridging the Web2 to our Web3 ecosystem.
As always, our focus on innovative, user-friendly and simplistic, blockchain-abstracting tools remains at the core of everything we build; an approach that continues to bare fruit.
With the world turning to blockchain at an increasing pace, we’re excited knowing our battle-tested technologies and platform remain firmly as a forerunner. We hope you’re enjoying watching our journey unfold — there’s plenty more to come!
About vechain
Vechain, headquartered in San Marino, Europe, is the curator of VechainThor, a world leading smart contract platform spearheading the real world adoption of blockchain technology.
Through leveraging the capabilities of ‘trustless’ data (information without intermediaries), smart contracts and IoT technologies, VechainThor has enabled solutions across a wide array of fields. Vechain now turns its attention to the greatest challenge of all — building digital ecosystems to drive sustainability and digital transformation at global scale.
Visit vechain.org to learn more
