VeChain is a smart contract platform focused on providing supply chain management solutions for enterprises and integrating with the Internet of Things (IoT) devices to facilitate the process. Its goal is to leverage distributed ledger technology to streamline these operations and information flow for complicated supply chains.
The VeChain platform aims to give authorized stakeholders a total view of critical information related to a product and its business processes (i.e storage, transit, supply, and authenticity) as well as increase market transparency.
VeChain Token ($VET) and VeChainThor Energy ($VTHO) are the two tokens on the Vechain network. The former is used to relay value across VeChain's network, while the latter is utilized to power smart contract transactions as energy or "gas."
VeChain is a multi-purpose enterprise blockchain for improving business operations and product tracking. VeChain blockchain development started in 2015 as a modified fork of Ethereum with a design focus on the Internet of Things (IoT) and supply chain management.
To date, VeChain has expanded its focus to multi-purpose functionality with customizable support for a range of enterprise uses. On-chain governance, cheap transaction fees, interoperability with non-blockchain technologies, and regulatory compliance are all priorities for VeChain core developers. VeChain wants to make all required information from manufacture to delivery (storage, transportation, and supply) available to all authorized parties for any enterprise business process that interacts with the VeChain Thor blockchain.
Consensus Mechanism
VeChain leverages the Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism. PoA is a Byzantine Fault Tolerant probabilistic consensus mechanism, based on HotStuff, which relies on Authority Masternodes (AM) associated with verified identities. PoA addresses enterprises' common concerns of inefficient upgrades and waste of energy.
Core Protocol
The core protocol of the Vechain blockchain has four meta-transaction features: Controllable Transaction Lifecycle, Multi-Party Payment (MPP), Multi-Task Transaction (MTT), and Transaction Dependency.
- Controllable Transaction Lifecycle
With BlockRef and Expiration transaction fields, users can set the time when the transaction is processed or expired if not included in a block.
Flexible transaction fee delegation schemes (Multi-party Payment and Designated Gas Payer) enable a freemium model within a decentralized application to onboard users without friction
Multi-function atomic transactions allow developers to batch payments, add multiple calls to different contract functions into one transaction and determine their sequence.
Set dependencies to ensure the execution order meets the business need, transactions that specify a dependency will not be executed until the required transaction is processed.
VeChain was co-founded by Jay Zhang and Sunny Lu. Sunny Lu is the current CEO of the VeChain project; Jay Zhang is the current CFO of the VeChain project.
Current known investors of VeChain include Aenigma Capital, Badwater Capital, Block VC, BlockAsset Ventures, ChainFunder, ChainLinker, ChainPE, Cipher Ventures, Digichain Capital, Draper Dragon, Fenbushi Capital, FlyFuture Capital, Future Cap, Gama Capital, Hash Capital, Kosmos Capital, LD Capital, Myriad Capital Management, ONEBOAT CAPITAL, Parallax Digital, RocketFuel, Token Research Group, Visionz Capital, and Whales Capital.
