VeChain

The VET asset is the native cryptocurrency of the VeChain project.

The VeChain ecosystem is a software environment that incentivizes network participants to run a distributed network supporting decentralized applications. This approach aims to let businesses digitally collaborate through new tools, enhanced data transfers and supply chain management solutions.

The VET price reached an all-time high value of $0.280991 on April 19, 2021. It’s all-time low of $0.00191713 was recorded on March 13, 2020.

The VET asset has a supply cap of 86,712,634,466 tokens.

The VET token was initially issued as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum under the VEN ticker. However, it was changed to VET once the VeChainThor blockchain went live, with VEN being swapped to VET at a 1:100 ratio.

One billion tokens were minted initially, with 41% sold during a public sale, 9% used for a private sale and 14% going to enterprise investors. Team members received 5%, and 12% of the supply was set aside to fund day-to-day operations.

The supply has remained stable since late 2019, and no more VET are being issued today.

VET was a relatively quiet coin between its launch and late December 2020. Since then, it peaked at its all-time high in April 2021 but lost over 80% in the following months, dipping to $0.058 in July 2021. It has seen a few ups and downs since then, but never got past $0.176 again. It does not appear subject to pump-and-dumps but rather follows the overall industry trend and sentiment.

VeChain uses proof-of-authority as its consensus mechanism. Users verifying and adding transactions do so as Authority Masternodes, which require locking up at least 25 million VET and submitting information to the VeChain Foundation. A total of 101 Authority Masternodes exist today. Users can also set up an economic masternode that serves as a "check on power" yet does not produce blocks or ledger records. Running an economic node requires locking up 10,000 VET.

The VeChain ecosystem rewards those who process computation with VTHO fees. There are two tokens in this ecosystem: VET for storing and transferring value and VTHO for blockchain transactions (similar to gas in platforms such as Ethereum).

The VeChain ecosystem supports smart contracts and decentralized applications.

VeChain launched in 2015 under the guidance of Sunny Lu and Jay Zhang. Its 2017 initial coin offering for the VEN token raised $20 million.

The project completed a seed round and venture round on April 14, 2018, and a corporate round on May 5, 2018, for undisclosed amounts.

VeChain hard forked in November 2021 to introduce Proof-of-Authority 2.0, enhancing network security and data finality. Another hard fork took place in June 2021 to maintain compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

Sonny Lu remains associated with the project as CEO of VeChain. Jay Zhang stepped down from the VeChain Foundation in 2019 after the Foundation lost $6.53 million due to a smart contract hack. However, he remains the vice president of finance for VeChain, per their website.

VeChain has no plans - and no immediate need - to explore layer-2 opportunities.