VeChain Advances Sustainability With Digital Ecosystems — Much More Than Climate Change
The term ‘sustainability’ is often considered a matter of climate change, or Amazonian deforestation. The reality, however, is much more broad.
Sustainability is a term that encompasses many areas of environmental, social, and economic well-being. The United Nations identified 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) addressing a wide range of topics, including poverty, hunger, health, education, clean water and sanitation, clean energy, decent work and economic growth, sustainable cities, responsible consumption and more.
Each of these fields represent a significant upgrade to the status quo, promising to greatly enhance the quality of life for billions of people globally. The VeChain Foundation proudly describes itself as the backbone of real-world blockchain-powered sustainability. The challenges to overcome are great, but the outcomes are even greater.
VeChainThor — The Blockchain of The Digital-Sustainable Ecosystem
A key concept of our current development is the ‘digital ecosystem’. Such systems represent an evolutionary leap in terms of interconnection, information sharing and collaboration, enabled by the power of VeChain’s blockchain.
Individuals and enterprises alike play a key role in VeChain’s digital ecosystems. Smart contracts transform data into valuable, actionable insights, and empower individuals by rewarding them with tokens that can be exchanged for goods and services.
In this new epoch, blockchain returns ownership and control of data to citizens, providing financial benefit in exchange for consented provision of user data that itself contributes to a greater good. Below, we explore some examples.
Low Carbon Energy Ecosystems
By leveraging blockchain, neighbourhoods can create virtual power plants that allow excess energy, for example that of solar panels, to be distributed locally. This kind of model reduces energy-related emissions by limiting reliance on central power distribution and efficiently shares excess supply among local participants. Such an ecosystem also improves the robustness of the local energy grid, mitigating energy outage risks.
The data generated by this ecosystem can be tokenised using smart contracts based on metrics such as carbon offset, or total Wattage of energy shared. By working with enterprises and brands to make these tokens exchangeable for goods and services, VeChain further incentivises individuals and businesses to pursue positive environmental activity.
Companies gain increased brand awareness and customer ‘stickiness’ while individuals gain monetarily from their involvement. Local shops and retailers can also benefit when rewards are localised to certain geographical areas.
Check out our video on ‘Low Carbon Digital Ecosystems’ for more insights.
Supply Chain Ecosystems — Ethical Resourcing, Improved Health Outcomes, Financial Empowerment
An area VeChain is best known for is supply chain management — but the supply chain industry is a multi-trillion dollar behemoth that affects the global economy in many different ways.
As a core feature, VeChain’s blockchain creates tamper-proof records of origin, movement, and authenticity of goods, in turn, ensuring products are ethically sourced, free from counterfeits, and with minimal environmental impact. VeChain Technology, a global BaaS software/hardware company, is well known for the many solutions it has designed and delivered in this field for large global brands.
Health Outcomes
In cases of foodborne illness caused by bacteria, chemicals or viruses, impacts can be significantly lessened using VeChain’s blockchain. Each unit’s origin and supply chain history are discoverable within seconds, allowing far more effective destruction of produce or product recalls in case of emergency.
Per information shared by Walmart China, the retail giant spent significantly less time and money on inventory management, reducing the average tracking time of items from 26 hours to just 10 seconds using VeChain’s blockchain. This efficiency gain, representing multiple orders in magnitude, is just one of the many factors that exemplify why VeChain’s blockchain is the future of industry and commerce.
The result is access to safer, healthier food with greater assurances of quality and better health outcomes for all.
Financial Empowerment
Blockchains work by creating a layer of trust between market actors without the need for an intermediate authority. By leveraging this attribute, VeChain can enable entirely new levels of efficiency for supply chain finance.
In 2020, VeChain joined the APAC Provenance Council. In this ecosystem, we introduced the concept of ‘milestone payments’, which saw payments being released upon the completion of certain criteria such as the delivery of a particular good to a manufacturer, or logistics hub.
By recording information with IoT devices and hashing that data on the VeChainThor blockchain, third party payment providers can independently verify the fulfilment of terms and release funds within 2 hours, vs the multiple weeks or in some cases months, of traditional finance.
By improving access to supply chain finance, VeChain greatly enhances the financial strength and cash flow of supply chain participants and reduces financial stress.
Ethical Resourcing
VeChain’s blockchain allows smaller market participants to independently provide transparent records of transactions and facilitate new kinds of collaboration with their customers. Our partnerships with Producers Market and the Anhui Tea Association exemplify the power of blockchain as a tool to support local farmers while tangibly improving competitiveness in their respective industries.
Blockchain creates transparency at the start of production, allowing consumers to directly engage and tip farmers or producers whose products they particularly enjoy, for example, those that are ethically sourced or environmentally benign. In this scenario, VeChain enables a new kind of economy by allowing consumers to ‘vote with their wallets’, empowered by the transparency of blockchain to encourage better production and support sustainable development in parts of the world that need it most.
Decent Work and Economic Growth Ecosystems
Decent HS is a company recently revealed to be building a Health and Safety platform on the VeChainThor blockchain at B.R.E.W 2022. The company is leveraging VeChain’s to digitise assets for its partnered companies.
By leveraging blockchain technology, auditors can gain access to instantly verifiable trails of data, ensuring the validity and safety of inspection certificates while allowing businesses to demonstrate compliance and provide assurances on workplace safety for employees.
Decent HS are building their platform in support of the 8th UN Sustainable Development Goal — ‘decent work and economic growth’, ensuring safe and proper working conditions. Grant Thornton Cyprus, Authority Node and VeChain partner, provide auditing services for the firm, building the first blockchain-powered Health and Safety ecosystem.
VeChainThor — Sustainable Development Drives Global Prosperity
The above examples represent just a few of the many kinds of digital ecosystems that will flourish on VeChain in the coming years.
Sustainability is a key aspect of global development, and will be for decades to come. Sustainable development is not only about reducing carbon emissions or ensuring responsible reuse of resources, but a holistic approach to raising the entirety of humanity equitably and ethically while ensuring the prosperity of our planetary ecosystem.
VeChain’s ‘digital ecosystem’ concept represents a milestone in reaching UN SDGs — targets with a 2030 deadline. By leveraging the power of blockchain technology, we are creating benefits for every participant. We look forward to unveiling more about digital ecosystems in our upcoming whitepaper, due by end Q1.
Join us as we kick off this incredible new epoch for sustainability, powered by real-world blockchain applications on the mighty VeChainThor.
About The VeChain Foundation
The VeChain Foundation, headquartered in San Marino, Europe, is the non-profit organisation behind the development of VeChainThor, a world leading smart contract platform spearheading the real world adoption of blockchain technology.
By leveraging the capabilities of ‘trustless’ data (information without intermediaries), smart contracts and IoT technologies, VeChainThor has delivered solutions in a wide array of fields, and now turns its attention to arguably the greatest challenge of all — building technologies and ecosystems to drive true sustainability and digital transformation at global scale.
Visit https://www.vechain.org to learn more.
