This Chinese Firm is Already Putting Businesses on an Ethereum-Based Blockchain
VeChain is a subsidiary and in-production blockchain platform of BitSE, a Blockchain-as-Service provider. That’s right – companies are actually using the proprietary, permissioned ledger based on Ethereum, but with all new code and features, in the now.
PwC, the multinational professional services firm, recently invested in Singapore-based VeChain S.E.A with hopes of helping to expand the blockchain-product into South East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.
No proof-of-concept, consumers can already buy wine in DIG with the VeChain application, as well as track information about a particular wine. Babyghost fashion clothes appear online with the app. The VeChain application currently supports more than two million unique IDs on the permissioned blockchain. To blend Internet of Things (IoT) technology with blockchain, VeChain incorporates unique IDs, NFC chips, RFID tags and Quick Response codes.
BitSE, launched in 2016, is Shanghai-based. The firm intends to increase efficiency in business by, as CEO DJ Qian says it, “lowering the cost of trust.” While the company used Ethereum as a starting point, it has made innumerable changes to the Ethereum model so it can better be tailored to commercial businesses. Qian says it is hardly Ethereum anymore, though it does use the Ethereum code Solidity.
The BitSE founder adds: “Our mission right now is to provide the most efficient platform for global collaboration, and build the infrastructure for a global value transferring network. Only if you know what your clients need and how the industry is going to evolve, can you develop this useful technology, and this is what our partnership with PwC offers.”
According to Mr. Qian, his team developed a practical smart contract. “With VeChain, we developed smart contracts to reflect real world business processes,” he said. “By calling APIs and smart contracts supported by VeChain, business is able to run automatically on top of a blockchain. For example, if the ownership of a specific product can be guaranteed by a platform and accepted, trusted by all the players in the whole supply chain, it will no longer be necessary for labor and paper documentation to trace said products in every warehouse during each step of the supply chain from the manufacturer to the consumer. Big costs will be saved, and the whole supply chain made more efficient.”
VeChain is used in Europe, China, Southeast Asia. “Paying clients are from different industries like luxury/fashion, food safety/wine spirits, pharmaceuticals, automotive, logistics, and even regulators,” says Mr. Qian. “Upstream and downstream players are collaborating on VeChain.”
Microsoft Technology Center in France and PwC Innovation Center in Shanghai invited VeChain to setup a demo center recently. “We believe this is a very good way to let more clients see, touch, and understand the blockchain application.” For now, VeChain will keep focused on transforming the supply chain today.
The demos will allow consumers and businesses to see what sorts of operations permissioned blockchains can do for a company, in particularly the supply.
“Supply Chain is a very important area,” says Mr. Qian. “The market will see more and more IDs running on VeChain, more and more value of the IDs using VeChain’s trust model, and more and more players collaborating on VeChain. This platform will make global business collaboration more efficient, lowering the cost of trust for business.”
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