As of early August, Vechain has launched its main net and most ERC20 VEN tokens have been exchanged for VET and are now churning away earning VTHO (The fuel of the Vechain ecosystem – similar to the relationship between NEO and GAS).
In this bear market the trickle of projects shopping around for which chain to build on is small, but Vechain has outperformed many projects this year and managed to build community and developer support for the future. Vechain was the first cryptocurrency project to partner with the Chinese government, with the party leadership of Guiyang hoping to make Vechain and its tokens an integral part of the creation of a SmartCity – a bid to become the ‘Silicon Valley of China’.
But such plans involving many parties, both political and businesses are slow to execute. With the Vechain main net less than three weeks old, the market is still working out just exactly how to price the new VeThor token, and the Vechain that produces it, especially as VeThor production rates will be adjusted over time, based on demand and usage for it.
Successful Integration with WeChat
But as per a Reddit post on August 17th the Vechain main net saw its first 0 value transactions – significant because, as opposed to a project like IOTA or NANO, zero value transactions are not free to make. It was WeChat, a Chinese social media, messaging and mobile payment company that created these transactions for a Chinese Valentine’s event, allowing its users to ‘immortalize’ their confessions on the blockchain by putting messages in the hash. Although less known in the West, the social media app producer has over 1 billion monthly users, mostly in Asia. The vast majority of these users have little knowledge of cryptocurrencies, but WeChat is also a mobile payment solution, and so was able to smoothly integrate a paid service making use of blockchain among its other paid services. That is to say, using a blockchain service was so effortless its users may not even have known that a blockchain was involved, much less how they work.
Transaction Expiration Feature
In the Reddit thread, users noticed a transaction expiration feature on VeForge platform. Basically, the transaction expiration feature gives the option to the transacting party to select the maximum number of blocks the transaction will attempt to get processed, before failing and the amount coming back to the participants wallet. This feature will help avoid the problem many participants faced during the monumental bullish run of bitcoin in December 2017, as the bitcoin network experienced huge traffic which delayed some transactions for as long as 20 hours before processing the same on blockchain.
And this is most likely where the future lies. If crypto is ever to truly enter into the mainstream, it can’t be a hassle to make use of it. Vechain here is helping to lead the way by making it easy to use blockchain, not for speculation, but for services.
