VeChain has huge potential, a working product, and big-name partners like PwC, Deloitte, and BMW. So how come the price of VET never goes up?

There’s a grim joke among VeChain bag holders – the better the news, the lower the price becomes.

This week alone CEO Sunny Lu has chatted with the Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte about potential use cases during the global food innovation summit Seeds and Chips in Milano.

Chinese food producer Bright Food began tracking one of its milk brands, ‘Cupid’s Farm Milk’, using VeChain. Consumers can now scan a QR code on the milk to see the journey it took to the store.

And SCB Bank, the largest commercial bank in Thailand, extolled the virtues and benefits of VeChain on its website, alongside more well-known cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ripple.

At the London VeChain meetup a few days ago, Lu told token holders the company now expects to have identified “more than 1000” use cases by the end of the year – up from 200 at present.

The supply chain tracking project held the VeChain Summit in San Francisco in late April, where it announced a half billion dollar fund to encourage developers to use the ecosystem.

To put that in perspective, that’s more money than the entire market cap of VeChain.

They also revealed that one of Price Waterhouse Coopers‘ major clients will soon announce that it is using the VeChain network in “a significant milestone to the entire blockchain space”.

And less than a month ago, another one of the Big Four accounting firms, Deloitte, migrated a substantial portion of its client work from Ethereum to VeChain. The move saw the VeChain blockchain record more transactions over the course of a weekend than Bitcoin.

Despite this real-world adoption and the seeming announcement every other week of a new partnership with another household brand, the price of VeChain has been bumbling along well under one cent since November.

About VeChain

VeChain is a blockchain-based supply chain tracking project that has partnered with many big name companies including BMW, Renault, BYD Auto, Amazon Web Services, Haier, People’s Insurance Company of China, PwC, Deloitte and DNV GL among others.

Investors include DraperDragon, Breyer Capital, Fenbushi, PwC APAC, and DNV GL.

Its advisory board includes Jim Breyer himself, Bo Shen, Founder of Fenbushi Capital, Nan Ning, CEO of BitOcean, Masanari Koike, former member of Japan Parliament, and Antonio Senatore, Global CTO Blockchain, Deloitte.

VeChain has had its own blockchain for a year now, and a series of other projects have launched on top of it including Plair, Cecil Alliance, OceanEx, Safe Haven, and Carenheit.

Project in a nutshell

Rather than focus on replacing money, VeChain was founded by former Louis Vitton Chief Information Officer Sunny Lu to track goods throughout the supply chain.

Counterfeit high-end goods cost the industry more than $30 billion a year.

To take just one example, you can use the technology to track a bottle of an expensive wine such as Penfolds Grange, from the winery in South Australia all the way to a liquor merchant in China.

The blockchain record reassures buyers the wine isn’t counterfeit – and it can also record related information such as whether the wine was stored at the correct temperature the entire way along the route.

Tracking can be done with QR codes, NFC, or RFID chips.

In 2018, VeChain was among the top ten companies globally for filing blockchain patents (it applied for 38 patents), alongside giants like Alibaba, Mastercard, Bank of America and IBM.

VeChain is actually being used

VeChin has launched wine tracking using My Story with producers Michele Chiarlo, Ricci Curbastro, Ruffino and TORREVENTO.

My Story is an off the shelf food and beverage tracking system created in partnership with global quality assurance and risk management company DNV GL (they’re massive with 350 offices in 100 countries).

Chinese producer Bright Food tracks products on VeChain’s network in a system called BrightCode. As mentioned above, the first product to be tracked on the platform ‘Cupids Farm Milk’ went live this week.

Given the contaminated milk scandal that Chinese consumers endured in 2008, it seems like a much-needed application.

At the VeChain summit, the company also unveiled ToolChain – a turnkey solution that’s basically VeChain in kit form to help smaller businesses to get up and running tracking their products within half an hour or so.

The Low Carbon Ecosystem powered by @DNVGL and @vechainofficial has been covered by @sole24ore, the number 1 financial outlet in Italy. Another major step towards raising awareness of real, impactful blockchain use cases.#VET @DNVGLBA_IT https://t.co/Y8EkoyUj20 — VeChain Italia [Unofficial] (@vechainitalia) May 22, 2019

Car industry applications

VeChain and BMW have also created a digital passport called VerifyCar for each vehicle that allows customers to verify the odometer and maintenance history of a vehicle.

The data is stored on the BMW Digital Ledger that was built using the VeChain Thor blockchain.

Everything that happens to the car – from repairs, sales and to trips – gets stored on the blockchain.

VeChain has also partnered with Chinese electric car manufacturer BYD on a carbon banking system that will eventually be rolled out to millions of vehicles. BYD is the largest manufacturer of electric vehicles in the world.

How is it organised?

VeChain was inspired by Ethereum but has been tailored to the requirements of corporations via extensive market research.

This means it strikes a balance between centralization and decentralization – so it offers the trust of a decentralized system, but is a lot easier to manage.

VeChain has 101 Authority Masternodes that form the backbone of the validation system.

VeChain is based on Proof of Authority and has a unique fee delegation feature that allows for costs of using the network to be covered by whoever benefits from it.

This means consumers and partners can interact with VeChain-powered dApps without having to pay for using the network.

Tokenomics

In June 2018, when the mainnet was launched, token holders received 100 VET for each 1 VEN they held. The total supply is now around 87 billion.

VET market cap: $400,553,379

Price at review: $0.007223

Circulating supply: 55,454,734,800

Total supply: 86,712,634,466

CMC rank: 27

The network uses two tokens: VeChain (VET) and VeThor (VTHO).

VeChain generates Thor, which is the gas you need to access or record information on the blockchain.

The amount of Thor generated can be varied to help stabilize costs for companies that wish to use the network.

Investment case

With so many big-name partners and potential applications, VeChain the company looks like it’ll have a bright future.

The real concern is whether token holders will benefit from that success.

Think of it like Ripple and XRP – banks are already using Ripple’s technology, but that is yet to translate into demand for the XRP tokens.

It’s also concerning that transactions on the blockchain are currently very low.

However, corporations take a long time to change direction and embrace new technology, so it may be some time (years) before they’re fully utilizing supply chain solutions like VeChain and for transactions rise to the point where there is considerable demand for Thor.

Lu has the final word

Lu dropped into the VeChain Telegram group this week for a Q&A where he painted a glowing picture of the future.

“The number of VC firms and project incubators surrounding the ecosystem is a good sign that more and more third-party and community-driven projects will be landing on the VeChain platform,” Lu said.

“Investors can also take solace in the prospect of new token utility, providing a deeper connection between token holders and the numerous enterprise use-cases already springing into action.”

DISCLAIMER: The author owns VeChain tokens.