VeChain Financial Executive Report Vol. 11
Transparency, Fairness, Openness
With the purpose of fostering transparent communication on our accomplishments on creating tangible economic value by blockchain technology, we hereby present the 11th VeChain Foundation Financial Executive Report, covering the period from February 2020 through to April 2020.
Despite complications in operating conditions brought by COVID-19, VeChain continues to build and seize the opportunity to facilitate the latest iteration of VeChain ToolChain™, which will bring about more business growth during and after the pandemic.
As always, we sincerely welcome the community to hold us to the commitment of transparency, including but not limited to the rigorous monitoring and usage of our funds, and the development process of all aspects within the VeChain Foundation.
The report structure is as follows:
1. VET Supply Overview
2. VeChain Foundation Expenditure (use of proceeds)
3. Notes
i) Enterprise Investor Pool
ii) Co-Founders, Development Team
iii) The Operation, Technological Research and Development
iv) Business Development
v) Compliance & Legal
vi) Ecosystem Development
1. VET Supply Overview
As of Apr 31, 2020, the circulating amount (i.e. 64,315,576,989) remains almost the same as the last reporting period. The circulating amount at this period end accounts for roughly 74.8% of the total supply, compared to 74.9%, last period end. Within the VET circulating supply, 21,833,053,627 VETs were in the soft-lockups, which makes 25.4% of the total supply. By the end of this reporting period, around 49.4% of the VET total supply is free for trading in the open market.
Note:
* The soft-lockup categories are as follows:
- Authority Masternode collateral — each Authority Masternode keeps at least 25 million VETs
- X Nodes staking — each X node keeps a minimum amount of VETs based on four different tiers
- Economic Nodes staking — each economic node keeps a minimum amount of VETs based on three different tiers
- Team Lockup — According to the whitepaper 5% of the total VET supply is allocated to co-founders and development team, as of Jan 31, 2020, over 3 billion VETs have been locked up by the team to show the commitment to VeChain’s long term success
**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.
2. VeChain Foundation Expenditure (use of proceeds)
We summarized below the USD value of the expenditure in fiat or BTC/ETH for the reporting period. For the spending in BTC or ETH, the USD value was booked based on the rate when the transaction occurred. In many situations our service providers and partners prefer to receive VET as direct payment or investment compared to using fiat or BTC/ETH. Therefore, the total expenditure for operation, technological and business development comprises a combination of direct VET payment and use of proceeds (fiat, BTC/ETH) depending on the associated parties’ preference.
3. Notes
i) Enterprise Investor Pool
During this quarter, the COVID-19 pandemic has largely put the investment activities on hold and no enterprise investor was accredited.
ii) Co-Founders, Development Team
Given the large impact brought by COVID-19 and uncertainty in the long term impact on the global economy, we made structured analysis of the current business and decided to put all team reward programs on hold for this quarter.
iii) The Operation, Technological Research and Development
During this period, there have been notable improvements announced to the public, highlighting our great efforts in R&D in exchange for huge technological achievements, which is illustrated as follows:
- The most significant VeChainThor mainnet code update Entropy (v1.3.0) was released. As a comprehensively enhanced redesign, v1.3.0 is currently the most significant update since the mainnet launch, bringing in many dramatic improvements, especially in terms of performance and efficiency. It can reduce 80% disk occupation and 50% RAM usage, meanwhile vastly reduce the tier query latency.
- Several updates on Sync were released to optimize the user experience of signing with Ledger devices and wallet selection, such as Sync v1.2.2 that has multiple improvements on UI and bug fixing.
- Several updates on VeChainThor on VeChain Official Explorer were released to improve the performance. This updated version enables users to download account transfer records.
iv) Business Development
During this quarter, VeChain was awarded a top 5% ranking among startups around the globe by Early Metrics, which recognized the development and growth logic, market positioning, technical professionalism, and operational execution of VeChain, further proving the potential of VeChain’s business growth.
Given the solid advantages in business friendly blockchain technology, VeChain enhanced partnership with Shanghai Gas to further enhance the partnership to kick off the further blockchain-based energy project. The partnership aims to optimize business processes, reduce operation cost, improve the supply chain efficiency and build a trust-free “Energy-as-a-Service” ecosystem. Sarah Regensburger, the vegan fashion label based in London has also chose VeChain ToolChain™ to boost the traceability and efficiency of product delivery.
Announced partnerships and collaborations (February, 2020 — April, 2020)
- Sarah Regensburger (February 28)
- PlatformXChain (March 17)
- Shanghai Gas (March 31)
Highlights from the business development and marketing events (February, 2020 — April, 2020)
- Kevin Feng, COO at VeChain, joined an AMA session hosted by Binance US, which was held at its official telegram. The event covers interesting topics related to VeChain, and has a live Q&A session for the community. Kevin stressed that VeChain differs from other public blockchains in terms of technical designs and growth philosophy, by developing blockchain technology and infrastructures that are ready for business adoption. (March 4)
- Sunny Lu, CEO and co-founder of VeChain, conducted a live AMA on Cryptocom’s Telegram Channel to share VeChain’s recent progress and to answer questions from the community. (April 23)
v) Compliance & Legal
VeChain hires professional service providers in cybersecurity and legal to ensure products and solutions we offer are secure and compliant with regulations, which we believe is the prerequisite of mass adoption by global enterprises.
vi) Ecosystem Development
In order to provide better support for community developers and improve the quality of contributions incorporated participation, the Foundation team has adhered to the Foundation Grant Program and bounty program, which was being implemented with increasing closer communication with our community. Besides incentive programmes, we are also working with consultants to approach for more resources to create diversity in ecosystem productivity. The team continues to evaluate projects and keeps productive discussions with several teams.