A buddy that shares the passion for VeChain and I have been on holidays in Shanghai. So we wanted to check how the VeChain office looks like in real of course. Luckily, by our request we were invited for the 2nd of May by Noah Huo, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).

Arrival and notes

VeChain building complex entry

If you ever wondered, it’s easy to visit VeChain in Shanghai if you were located anywhere central-ish. It’s Yuyuan road 546, easily reachable with the metro and a few minutes to go by feet. VeChain works together with other companies in a co-working space building complex and they occupy two floors inside building 4. When we arrived, it seems the schedule was a little bit unexpected (I can imagine, many things to do and still in the morning it was his 4th meeting already), but still Noah took time for us and we were relieved. And we were quite lucky as Noah was in Seoul for a Korean community meetup the previous days.

Reddit is a great source of information, you can usually bet that news of VeChain get referenced there the minute they get published. So during the labor days, we were astonished to get some new information. 2 Medium posts in one day! About the medium posts, we wondered and really, the team did work over the holidays as Noah told us.

“Crypto never sleeps.”

I just call it dedication from the team. But for the context you have to know: The Chinese usually work on the weekend one week before labor days to get consecutive holidays in return. So 3 impressive medium articles have been published over the “holidays”. If you did not read them yet, you really should catch up.

The mysterious Coca Cola Kid posted a tweet as well. You can basically read anything about it’s cryptic signals and messages on the reddit thread.

Ok, that’s quite old information for some people. So more about the visit.

Welcoming talk

Just a sticker

First, we got a great introduction how VeChain established itself, moved the office to a bigger location to meet the growth and what the roadmap for the next weeks would look like. Exciting days are ahead with the preparation of the mainnet golive and testing phase.

The information for the blockchain/wallet testing phase was just published one day earlier, and Noah already got about 50 mails for this. Wow! You should know by reading the previous links. People can submit an application to participate and see if they find weak spots and possible problems or have other feedback if you got the proper relevant background. It just reflects how important the community is to VeChain and how supportive they have been already. So this is a quite important topic obviously. The application phase is still going on AFAIK (“From May until early June”).

During our talk and the presentation of VeChain we definitely felt that Noah was really proud of the community support which he stated a few times. The community has grown immensely over just a few months. I’ve seen it myself as a supporter from October on when I first saw the video of VeChain and Sunny Lu on stage. About half of the potential clients got in touch through helping hands in the community.

On the side of business development generally, VeChain is of course growing with demand and effort, so new potential employee candidates and of course enterprises are very welcome to get in touch.

If you read this, think you qualify and think it’s something you would be passionate about, give it a try! There has been a medium post about the rough information and initial HR contact address: https://medium.com/@vechainofficial/vechain-financial-executive-report-vol-2-2fb65e91dad1

Also, think about the alpha/beta testing to get a first impression on how things could be from the a technical side.

Some other news that were already posted by Blue Node Capital: A new office is being installed in the U.S.A. This way the demand on the business situation there can be met as interest is growing and opportunity lies here as well.

Interest from German speaking countries and the Netherlands is also quite big, so locations in Europe could also be possible someday maybe. For now the location with Jerome in Paris should be checked out and be supported of course. As he is the single person in charge there, he has all hands full managing things. Remote work could be possible from what I understood.

In the meantime up until now we got tons of news and events were attended so I spare you the things you can read anywhere else as well. But, one thing: Read the white paper and development plan!

The tour

Now let’s talk a little bit about the famous office tour! It really deserves it’s spot as it takes some time to go from one corner to the other. I have to apologize for not remembering many details, it’s just too much at once but you get a great impression from the video posted in the previous link I guess.

When we got the tour, we saw the glimpse of a typical startup atmosphere with specialized teams and team bonding decorations but also some empty walls. There was a dedicated office room for Fenbushi Capital, a gym room, a room with some cute kitten and many other corners I do not remember or just would describe wrong. Just imagine a nice office place you want to look out for with hard working, dedicated people.

They even got a buggy

Inside the vast demo and meeting room there was some magic at work apart from what we already knew.

Demo shelf with several testable goods

NFC scannable wine and luxury bag

The VeChain pro app was shown in action (find a well known video here) with NFC and we were scanning and reading demo wine bottle information. You could even see the customs sheet as attached image proof inside the app information. The authenticity proof and informational scan is probably the most known use case by now. As it may be known, the chips are sewn directly into the bag. So if someone was to tamper with this by getting the chip out, the bag and chip would be damaged/destroyed. Of course you already know that VeChain has working products and real world use cases.

What we did not see yet (I think) were 2 monitors with dashboard-like information about the temperature control system and the inventory management demo setup.