On august 16th, Kevin Feng (COO) was invited by Coin98 for a live AMA on Facebook. 

Below you can read back on the actual AMA, which has been edited slightly for readability and the questions have been put into categories.

Grace Pham: Welcome to our community Kevin Feng Thank you for taking time from your schedule to join us today. We are much appreciated. I hope that you will enjoy the AMA.

Kevin Feng: Thanks for having me here. I’m glad that the Vietnamese community is keen to learn about Vechain. I hope everyone can leave this AMA with deeper understanding of what Vechain is and our vision!

Introduction to Kevin and Vechain

Before we start could you please introduce a little about yourself? And what is special about Vechain that made you choose them to work for?

Sure. I’m the COO of Vechain. joined Vechain in at the beginning of 2018, before that I was a cybersecurity and privacy consultant in PwC. spent two years in PwC New York and the rest of the time in PwC Shanghai.

Q: Firstly, Could you briefly describe what is VET in 3-5 sentences?

Vechain is a general purpose public blockchain. At the same time, Vechain is the enabler of a ecosystem made up of enterprise, startups and professionals who aim to use blockchain tech to solve real world problems and create business value.

Vechain is the enabler of a ecosystem made up of enterprise, startups and professionals who aim to use blockchain tech to solve real world problems and create business value

Q: What does Vechain mean? Why is that name?

As some of you may know, we started with trace ability solution, so Vechain stands for verified blockchain. but as we broaden our use-cases, we feel it’s a nice name to keep

Q: What’s the problem that VET is trying to address?

We want to prove the business value of the blockchain by solving real world economic problems through the adoption of enterprise and businesses

Q: The Real-World Applications of Blockchain Technology ,Could you share your vision on blockchain’s journey to mass adoption and How does Vechain do ?

Good question. The problem with a lot of public blockchains now are that they purely focus on the tech side. In Vechain in addition to tech, we also go out and work with our partners like pwc and dnv gl to build solutions that could solve real business needs for enterprises, thats why you see a lot real world adoption of Vechain tech such as Walmart China.

Q: In your business model, who is your customer?

Our model is B2B2C, in which the Vechain Foundation enables business ranging from startups to large corporates to use vechain technology to build solution to create business value and those solutions are being used by their customers which is much broader than just crypto community.

Q: Vechain has many versions for customers, so which customer segment does Vechain target? What plans does Vechain have to attract more users to participate in the ecosystem in the future?

Yes, we build a wide range of tools. we spent a lot effort on supply chain. but the next stage is really the ecosystem builders to leverage our tools and support to explore new segments as long as it could create business value

Q: Vechain focuses on businesses, but consumers are also one of those who need to know the origin of the product and especially distinguish fake goods. Are you guys oriented towards developing this audience?

Business users who use our tech have much wider user base which will be using vechain on daily basis

Transactions and the consensus model

Q: Any plans to deal with the steep transaction fees?

We are aware of the fluctuation of VTHO price. and our research team, economic professor and professor from oxford are closely monitoring the trend. We feel the market is not mature enough yet. and the economic model is being tested in real life. We will closely monitor it and adjust with our governance model at macro level when it’s appropriate.

In the meantime, we have launched various bounty and subsidy programs for developers.

Q:  Do you and the team have an estimate of how many clauses we will have everyday by the end of 2019? If so, are you able to disclose this?

We can’t give an estimation on that. Cause once the enterprises are on board the tx may vary based on their operation. but we focus on expanding the solution to more of their business. and I believe with toolchain the adoption will only continue to grow.

Q: Why is VET using PoA instead of PoS, is there any advantages?

We feel PoA is the most practical way to get enterprise adoption at this stage. A couple advantages:

1. it doesn’t require huge energy consumption and maintaining the network is not costly
2. it helps the networks to scale cuz the authority nodes are kyced and they follow the policy, there will be no hardfork on vechain. the recent facebook libra blockchain kinda has the same design which kinda proves it’s more suitable for commercial use

Q: How effective is Vechain’s Proof of Authority against PoW and PoS in terms of scalability, decentralization and security?

Right now running a vechain authority node only cost around $500 per month which is much lower than some dpos nodes. The cost will only increase as the tx volume grow and the whole network capacity will grow when the authority nodes upgrade the hardware. and PoA avoids hardforks.

Q: How do Vechain deal with the 51% attack?

PoA requires we kyc all our nodes. you can refer to the Vechain whitepaper for more details

Q: How are the Authority Masternodes different from the other nodes?

They are the ones that can produce blocks

Q: How many masternode do you have? How to become a masternode on Vechain?

Vechain has 101 nodes, and can apply on portal.vechain.com.

Tokenomics

Q: The road from 2017 to till date has been very rough to the whole crypto space. How did you survive and what kept you going?

Proper treasury management and the believe in our vision. The culture in vechain is trust, dedication and open

Q: VTHO had a big crash dump price after listing in Aug 2018. Do you think the VTHO is undervalued now?

I can’t comment on the price. but the fluctuation is mainly due to speculation as the market is immature. Not many people really understand the economic model, VTHO is really designed to encourage usage

Q: How many tokens is your team holding? And how can I track it?

The team was allocated with 5% of the supply. We release financial report every quarter. The team reward is released quarterly and the reward for executive team is being locked since the ICO.

Q: Can you share about token distribution? What is your token release schedule?

Please check our latest quarterly financial report.

Q: What is the economic model of Vechain? What are the benefits of Vechain to government in internet 4.0?

Vechain has a two token economic model aiming to detach the transaction cost with the market volatility. Again Vechain’s key advantage is that we not only focus on tech, we are a team with business mindset and real life experience in large corporates and consulting firm. A lot time clients feel they finally understand what blockchain can do for them after talking to us.

Q: Why Were X-Nodes made tradable?

We mentioned before, it was originally due to the request from the community, cause people want to transfer nodes to a new address when they feel the old address was not safe. And we noticed that people are trading nodes in OTC which is extremely insecure, that’s why we tokenized the node so that people have secure way to transfer the node.

Q: Will X-Node holders have more benefits in the future?

You can probably see some benefits recently, such as discount and special treatment in IEOs. we are exploring other benefits too

Q: How important are Mjolnir/ Thunder/ Strength/ VeThor X Node for Vechain?

They are the core of our community and ecosystem

Partners and competition

Q: Compared to the different blockchain, it can be seen that the scalability of Vechain is low, does not support side-chain and does not support long transactions. So, how will Vechain improve these issues in the future to overcome competitors?

Based on blocktivity, Vechain was once ranked top 3 in terms of transaction volume. PoA helps us scale as well. Internally, we have developed sidechain solution too.

Q: Currently Vechain has invested in many projects. To date, most projects with Vechain investment have developed steadily. So what are the plans for the next years of Vechain? Focus on developing more products, or finding potential projects to sponsor, …?

The plan is really to enable builders on the Vechain ecosystem. In the past, Vechain built a lot use case where we work directly with large companies, but it’s mainly to set up examples and put our solution to real life test.

Now we have released a lot tools which including toolchain which is a blockchain as a service solution to easily on board enterprise clients. We are opening up all those solutions and tools to builders in the ecosystem

Q: The Vechain ecosystem is applied in a variety of industries, so are the techniques in those industries different? Does investing in many industries disperse concentration or reduce the quality of strong industries?

Some part of those solutions are common, cause at the bottom level some tech is common. Also for use cases like product traceability, we have created polished product where enterprises do not need to do any development

Q: As a blockchain-as-a-service, how does Vechain Toolchain compare with hyperledger or r3?

Great question. Vechain is probably the only project that has built a commercial grade blockchain as a service solution on top of a public blockchain infrastructure. Comparing with private solution, the data, transactions are more trustworthy and enterprises do not have to put in a lot upfront cost (building a private blockchain).

The revenue we got from those projects will be used to purchase VET/VTHO from the open market to continuously support those solutions which ultimately benefit the token holders. We have the whole community to promote our solutions and even do business development for us. that’s a huge advantage

Q: From my understanding, Walmart China has implemented Vechain’s solution in their “Walmart’s Blockchain Traceability System” since June 2019. This is a real adoption, real use case that we want to see in crypto world. Could you please share a bit more detail about this success ? Could you please share the latest update of this partnership/integrationship with Walmart China ? 

It’s a model project, cause we deliver the project with PwC who is the food safety expert. Only through this way you can deliver a project that actually solve real problem and that’s why walmart china was convinced to implement this on our public blockchain. In the vechain ecosystem, we have a bunch of consulting partners and tech partners such as pwc dnv gl and deloitte.

Q: Some competitors with Vechain such as Request Network, Stratis, Aion, Jelurida, Orchid Labs, PIVX, Vertcoin …. now Vechain is leading the way thanks to a large partnership network. But in terms of technology and services, how does Vechain get away from these competitors?

Some of these project you mentioned have a different focus than us. But the industry should be about collaboration instead of competition at this stage. Vechain’s key advantage is that we not only focus on tech, we are a team with a business mindset and real life experience in large corporates and consulting firms. A lot time clients feel they finally understand what blockchain can do for them after talking to us.

Vechain’s key advantage is that we do not only focus on tech, we are a team with a business mindset and real life experience in large corporates and consulting firms.

Q: Can you tell more about the relationship between Vechain and OceanEx?

OceanEx is an crypto exchange focusing on Vechain ecosystem. We share the same vision and they are run by professional people. but we are independent projects. OceanEx also launched their platform token on Vechain blockchain. OceanEx is launching their first IEO in a few days.

Q: What is the current status of Vechain’s solutions in areas of Retail/Agriculture/Automobile, etc.? What difficulties do you face in implementing your solutions and what keeps you inspiring in achieving your goals?

We are pushing heavily in these industry with our partners especially DNV GL. They launched MyStory which is probably the first blockchain application built by such a traditional company on a public blockchain infrastructure.

We are inspired because so many enterprise small to large found the solution could help their businesses. Of course currently education, awareness and regulatory compliance are challenges

Q: IBM did the acquisition of PwC Consulting, the global management consulting and technology services unit of PricewaterhouseCoopers. Are you on a certain level going to co-operate/partner with IBM? IBM is working with the private ledger platform Hyperledger, will Vechain be the public/hybrid solution for clients that want to store their information on a public/hybrid ledger?

Nothing I can share on this, but we are working on cross chain solutions between Vechain and private chains

Dapps

Q: I see Vechain just had 10 dapps and most of them are lack of activity. So what Vechain will make to improve it?

What you didn’t see are the blockchain applications that were built and used by enterprises. Those are commercial grade, and enterprises usually prefer certain level of privacy for example, they may not want to reveal their smart contract addresses.

Q: Could you tell some lights from Use Cases or DApps on Vechain? Are there any ideas for a stable coin working on VechainThor in the future?

A stable coin is something that we are looking at. We are talking to existing stable coin issuer as well as some national partners.

Q: Where do Dapps build on Vechain stand against Dapps build on EOS and TRX? Can you name some of your existing Dapps and what future Dapps excites you the most?

I recommend you to try CometVerse. It uses the fee delegation feature of vechain blockchain to provide seamless user onboarding experiences where users do not need to hold coins in order to use the dapp. It solve a huge barrier for dapps

Q: Do you have dev kit for developers? What its programming languages? Java C++/Python?

Solidity is used for smart contracts, please visit our tech documentation to learn more.

Other

Q: Developing wallet platforms and information processing services are two of the goals that Vechain develops, attached to it, always talking about fast and secure information processing and transaction speed, making How does Vechain ​​always keep those things stable and less problematic?

Our dev team focuses a lot on the code quality. We follow a lot traditional software development process to do enough testing. As my previous cybersecurity background, we have a heavy focus on this.

We have been running bug bounty programs since the beginning together with Hacken as well.

Today,we're officially starting our new journey with @vechainofficial & @CREAMethod. To our loyal $HKN community, thankyou for always supporting & being by our side. With our new #HackenAi companion app, together, we'll lead the crypto security revolutionhttps://t.co/t2t2gYdhLO

— Hacken (@Hacken_io) August 2, 2019

Q: Just wondering does Vechain plan to add a BTC address in the Vechain wallet? I think that would be a wonderful feature for the Vechain wallet.

Not that I’m aware of. We built our own wallet cause there was no user friendly wallet when we launched our mainnet. We actually want the community to build a high quality wallet and we are willing to support that.

Q: How do you plan to give people from the United States more on ramps to buy Vechain?

We are actively working with US licensed exchanges

Q: Carbon reduction data are collected through IoT equipment, and the data will be reviewed and verified by an independent third party. So what is an IoT device? If a third party makes a mistake, does that affect Vechain’s brand?

IoT devices depends on the scenario and what data is collected. It could be NFC/ RFID/ temp sensor/ or the computer on the car. DNV GL verifies the activity, they have the authority and brand to protect the data collection.