In a recent interview on Bloxlive.TV, Jason Rockwood, country manager at VeChain, explains the company’s role in its partnership with Walmart, how VeChain’s two-token system works, and why VeChain, a fully decentralized public blockchain that was inspired by Ethereum, is more appropriate than Ethereum for enterprise use.
Rockwood says that there are a number of enhancements to the protocol that are propelling its evolution. According to Rockwood, Ethereum’s governance model has stalled the project on many fronts, making changes difficult to execute and affecting the growth of the project.
For that reason, he says VeChain chose a centralized governance system.
“One of the first things that makes a big difference is our governance model. It is more centralized than Ethereum… It’s easier to update and easier to manage. And at the end of the day, that’s what a lot of enterprises are looking for. They want to make sure that they’re making an investment in a platform that will always be at the head of the curve in terms of what’s best practices for technology.”
Rockwood explains why centralized governance is not the same as centralized data or centralization of the platform itself.
“VeChain is a fully public decentralized protocol… all the data on the blockchain can be viewed by the public.
I think that when we talk about the challenges with centralized protocols, we typically mean protocols like Hyperledger that are permissioned and private. There’s really no way to publicly audit those transactions.
In a sense, a project like Hyperledger is a really a ‘blockchain-like’ private database, whereas VeChain is a true blockchain.
In that regard, I think we have the right balance in terms of centralization on the governance side and decentralization on the protocol side.”
In addition to VeChain’s high-profile partnership with Walmart, which tracks products along the supply chain, ensuring the authenticity of its products, Rockwood says there are other interesting enterprise collaborations in development.
“We’re very proud of our relationship with the world’s largest electric car manufacturer BYD which is based in China, and we’ve partnered with them to build a carbon credit ecosystem that incentivizes consumers to make better decisions for the environment. We’re also working with DNV GL and the government of San Marino which is a small nation-state in Italy, and we’re working with them on a number of government administrative initiatives.
And I’d also mention our work with BMW, where we’re working on a number of efficiencies in making their cars more secure and helping with the verifiability of some of the auto data.”