VeChain held its first Summit on April 18th, 2019 in San Francisco. Next to speakers from the VeChain team, the ecosystem projects and speakers from DNV GL, Deloitte, Draper Venture Network, Microsoft and BMW attended.

In the VeChain Summit 2019 recap series, I will share the key highlights of all the speakers. You can rewatch the Opening Speech by Sunny Lu, which is part of the early morning session, here on youtube.

An ecosystem build to create valuable transactions

The Summit kicks off with a nice introduction video in the same style as the video during the VeChain rebrand event, after which the CEO of VeChain, Sunny Lu joins the stage.

He starts off with a joke about being late because he was nervous the crowd expected him to rap like we recently saw Ethereum’s founder Vitalik do on stage.

Sunny Lu then talks about the Foundation’s goal: to support the building of the VeChain ecosystem and create valuable transactions.

VeChain can’t do this alone and Sunny says that everyone in the ecosystem can play a role in this.

The key players in the ecosystem are the community, enterprises, developers and the foundation itself.

In the remainder of his speech, Sunny explains how the VeChain Foundation will help the ecosystem in four different area’s.

Legislation

What currently is missing in the blockchain world is legislation as an infrastructure layer.

This legislation is currently a big hurdle for enterprises and startups looking to implement blockchain technology.

By working closely with governments, enterprises and legal advisors like VeChain’s advisor Daniel Kellman, VeChain is trying to create a legislative framework that can be used from big enterprises to smaller startups.

Funding

The ecosystem can’t grow without proper funding, that will allow all parties to continue to work and develop their solutions.

To help with this, Sunny announces that the Foundation will make a $500 million fund available for everyone that wants to build on the VeChainThor blockchain. This money is coming not only from the Foundation but also from enterprises as well as innovation funds from Governments.

As part of this Fund, VeChain is currently running an incubator and reward program for those looking to develop on the VeChainThor blockchain. Click here to learn more about the VeChain developer bounty program.

VeChain can also bring projects in contact with incubators like LongHash or Boost VC and venture capital firms like Fenbushi Capital or Draper network, who are partnered with VeChain.

The ecosystem also has an internal force to help projects, called CREAM. CREAM has done lots of good work in the past 1,5 years working closely together with VeChain and its projects.

Sunny Lu has asked CREAM to onboard more projects and create new success stories within the ecosystem.

Technology

The technical team of VeChain currently has over 60 people and has been working on the technology powering VeChain for the past few years.

The technology consists of four different protocol layers:

IOT Layer – The hardware sensors that connect to the real world. The blockchain core – The open source VeChainThor protocol Infrastructure services – End-user applications – Wallets and applications to interact with the services.

Sunny welcomes everyone to use any of these technical protocols they need and implement these into their own products and processes.

VeChain is proud that not only the bigger players like PwC, Deloitte and DNV GL but also smaller startups like Mr. Sabotage are using the VeChainThor blockchain to create valuable transactions.

The VeChain Summit marks the official release of the VeChain ToolChain.

VeChain ToolChain will allow enterprises, without blockchain knowledge, to implement blockchain technology.

It has been in development for over 3 years by a team of 60 people, and the solution is the result of all the knowledge the team has gathered in the past few years onboarding enterprises onto the VeChainThor blockchain.

Using ToolChain, anyone can implement blockchain technology within 30 minutes. Enabling everyone to create valuable transactions and become part of the VeChain ecosystem.

The Foundation will make a ToolChain kit available, that includes all the software, hardware and IOT needed to implement blockchain technology in your business.

Click here to learn more about ToolChain (coming soon).