VeChain COO Kevin Feng’s blockchain lecture transcript in English

Last Friday, VeChain COO Kevin Feng was invited by Bihu.com to give a lecture regarding “How far is the blockchain technology from massive enterprise adoption?” The lecture is in podcast format, livestreamed to over 35,000 Chinese community members and blockchain enthusiasts spanning over 75 WeChat groups.

During his lecture, Kevin explained the challenges blockchain applications are now facing for massive enterprise adoption. Key challenges include:

AML and CFT issues

This is the top concern of all regulators around the world. Blockchain has a certain degree of anonymity, the initiation of the transaction can be done by digitally signing the identity of the private key. However, there is no mandatory relationship between the private key and the actual enterprise or individual. Therefore, this is the first problem necessary to be solved in the large-scale application of enterprises. When conducting commercial activities and financial transactions, there must be a strong authentication mechanism.

Systemic risks

In our customer engagement, customers are hesitant to say that there are many blockchain solutions on the market today, but customers are not in a position to judge these solutions due to lack of industry standards. To solve this problem, we need to adjust the governance structure of the blockchain. With a strong governance structure, the technologies development and upgrades to the blockchain platform will have a clear direction. Even with new technologies coming out, the blockchains can be updated to keep with emerging technology. Nowadays, many public chain platforms, because of the lack of a governance structure, may encounter problems such as hard-forking when carrying out program upgrades. This is a critical obstacle to overcome for end users to commit to long term use of a blockchain solution.

Technology and operational risks

At present, enterprises use the traditional IT systems. Moving their supporting operations, internal control processes and control points to the blockchain poses a great challenge. Many businesses worry: with the blockchain technology, the corresponding operation and some processes can not keep up.

VeChain is in the development of blockchain applications, in addition to providing the underlying technology, but also assess the package solution, from the application layer, API, smart contracts and the underlying, to give customers a complete solution. Customers get the program immediately after use. Our blockchain solutions will tend to be more in line with our customers’ current IT systems with the ability to scale with emerging tech and software standards.

Governance and controls

Blockchain platforms are likely to become regulators in the future with the capability to audit and regulate itself or other solutions. If the blockchain is the platform for large-scale enterprise applications, you must have a governance structure. The decentralized public chains being showcased have almost no governance structure, which is also a relatively large consideration for those solutions as the see adoption.

Cybersecurity

Although blockchain technology is distributed and has digital signature protection, there are still hidden dangers of network security. When enterprises use blockchain platform, the private keys represent identity of entities. Private key In large-scale enterprise applications, it is difficult to ensure that every user’s private key security. When an enterprise uses a blockchain platform, the private keys represent identity of entities much like company bank accounts identify a company. It can be challenging to ensure the security of all of their private keys while matching unique users to their entities in previous solutions of private keys. To tackle this issue, VeChain will provide customers with a custom online wallet service and a hardware wallet with built in properties designed for enterprise uses.

Legal risks

First, regulatory requirements in all regions, the second is the legal risks of privacy. Some of our clients are in the luxury industry, and we need to ensure compliance with local European privacy protections when we provide them with solutions.

In the past two years, VeChain has successfully implemented the blockchain solutions for enterprises, Kevin shared four projects with the audience, which are:

• Luxury goods lifecycle management — French luxury brand;

• Traceability solution for wine — D.I.G;

• Digital passport for automobiles — Renault Group;

• Cold-chain logistics solutions — A global convenience store franchise.