A Beginner’s Guide to VeChain

By Swati Kishore

VeChain has made many headlines this year, from inking carbon emission reduction deal with DNV GL, to partnering with Shanghai authorities to aid in authentication via Blockchain; hence it is only natural to wonder what VeChain is used for. If you are looking for such answers and more then this beginner’s guide to VeChain is the right place to start.

What is VeChain?

VeChain is a Blockchain platform that is endeavouring to develop a distributed business ecosystem for organisations, an ecosystem that is also trust free. With commercial use cases across industries like agriculture, retail, etc, VeChain Blockchain finds its best application in the logistics sector where it is used to trace the journey of a good from the beginning of the manufacturing process to the end consumer. As per the latest news VeChain Foundation’s Thor Blockchain to get an updated source code soon. The project is now rebranded as the VeChainThor Blockchain.

VeChain: The Blockchain 3.0

Launched in 2009, Bitcoin was the first innovation on a Blockchain. Then came Ethereum in 2014 which widely came to be known as the Blockchain 2.0. The VeChainThor now brands itself as the Blockchain 3.0.

While the work on this Blockchain started in 2007, but VeCoin was ultimately launched in 2015. It was launched as a platform which would effectively resolve ownership issues and will facilitate in the improvement of transparency. VeChain is trustless and decentralised, and can be used by organisations for myriad use cases. Being a Smart Contract platform, VeChain can also be used for the development of wallet services, digital ownership services, KYC services, and more.

VeChain Thor Blockchain

The Blockchain’s governance models overlaps between centralization and decentralization. In fact, the VeChain Foundation has adopted a set of guidelines known as the ‘Governance Principles and Charters’. The rules in the charter state the principles for the evolution of the VeChain ecosystem.

The owners of the smart contracts and master node holders play a crucial part in the VeChain ecosystem by enabling the smooth functioning of the network. It is to be noted that for a node to be accepted into the network, it is to hold a determined number of VEN tokens. VEN is the currency of the ecosystem and it is to be changed to VET to reflect the name change to VeChainThor.

Proof of Authority Algorithm

With Proof of Work deployed by the Bitcoin Blockchain, and Proof of Stake used by Ethereum, VeChain comes with the unique Proof of Authority Algorithm that aims to address the drawbacks of both the above mentioned consensus algorithms. VeChain Blockchain comes with pre-approved nodes. New nodes are only added after successful voting by the pre-approved authority nodes.