The company was founded in 2015 by Sunny Lu and his team with the vision to make it easier for everyone to access business services through combining IoT with blockchain technology. In June 2016, they launched their first product - DIGITAL CERTIFICATE OF ORIGIN - aiming to reduce fraud cases in wine import from France to China. They used special chips to seal each bottle, and embedded these chips into the bottles' outer layer. The information about every bottle's layout, design and other data were stored on a blockchain network. If there's any attempt to open or alter the information on the chip, it will be seen on the blockchain.
After that success of DIGITAL CERTIFICATE OF ORIGIN, more than 7.000 companies, including Louis Vuitton and Microsoft started to apply for Vechain's other products related to luxury goods, food inspection, IoT (manufacturing), agricultural products like wine and many others. VET is currently listed as 28th coin with respect to total market cap (4th Nov 2017). It has gained over 30% in last 7 days alone!
There are several characteristics which make this project valuable:
Custom solutions - Any company can customize their own solution based on VeChain's API. Many industries like food & beverages, fashion & luxury, logistics & transportation are adopting this technology.
Strong partnerships - VeChain announced partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers in June 2017 to work on the development of blockchain solutions and DIGITAL CERTIFICATE OF ORIGIN (DCO). This follows up with BMW and Microsoft which recently adopted their anti-counterfeiting capabilities as well.
Ecosystem tokens - VET is used as a payment method for different types of payments between parties; payments for applications developed by other members (which will be discussed later), as well as transactions within VeChain ecosystem such as payments for smart contract executions, storage services and much more.
Vechain's primary goal is based on previous statement: "to make it easier for everyone to access business services through combining IoT and Blockchain technology" and aim to solve 4 main problems.
Counterfeiting - Vechain provides anti-counterfeit capabilities which differs from other blockchain solutions. It is based on providing physical products with unique identities that will be stored on their private blockchain. Since they are using RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), every product such as clothes, bags, shoes etc can hold a chip inside of it. The chip has the ability to store data which is readable by any third party application via Vechain's interface, but no one can alter or delete this information after being deployed. This means you have all the information about your product on your mobile phone at any time.
Product track and trace - We can see the whole history of a product with this feature. You will never forget where you bought your jeans, or how much it costed. All this information is documented on blockchain network (private one), which is accessible to everyone after they register as a user through "MyVechain" app (Android and IOS). You can also ask for receipts at any time based on those products' IDs; if you go to another country, it's now possible to check every detail about your shoes and know what kind of leather is used in order to confirm whether these were made by child labor or not! VeChain already has partnerships with KARL LAGERFELD for real-time tracing of its products on the platform, which is expected to be implemented in November 2017.
Data management - VeChain has one of the most secure networks while still able to provide fast transactions (which will be discussed later). It utilizes asymmetric cryptography (private/public key pairs) and hashing algorithms with HMAC usage for data integrity.
IoT solutions - When it comes to IoT compatible devices, they are trying to tackle around 2 problems: high power consumption and low Tx/s speeds due to low bandwidth or small CPUs. Their solution? "Think different". They have created a chip named after one of their developers called XENSERVICES888 , an Internet-of-Things services engine for businesses. I have mentioned it before in "general overview" section because this chip will be used in every IoT device requiring an API connection to VeChain. You can use "Vechain Thor" public blockchain or their private one and choose the best according to your needs!