Vechain Tech Update Series — August 2023

Continuing our approach of shining a light on the hard work and efforts of our growing developer team, we’re delighted to share the second vechain tech update article! You can find the first edition here.

As mentioned previously, we committed to hiring 100 developers over three years for our Technology Centre in Ireland, targeting experienced developers from diverse backgrounds. We continue to welcome new team members, expanding our technical expertise in all disciplines. Our team is laser-focused on developing the tools and tech to make vechain a leading platform for individual and enterprise builders alike.

Let’s look at what has been going on with vechain’s tech teams in our August update!

Services

VORJ — ‘Web3-as-a-Service’ Platform

VORJ is vechain’s powerful Web3 as a service platform, designed to become a primary development platform for the ecosystem. VORJ offers businesses and individual developers a simple, intuitive way to quickly and easily deploy digital assets or integrate blockchain-powered APIs with minimal coding experience.

This month, we’ve been working on:

VORJ Landing Page Launch

We recently launched the VORJ landing page, check it out here. Now, users can find all relevant resources, links and guidance relating to the VORJ platform in one easily accessible location.

Direct Marketplace Integration

You will shortly be able to mint and list NFTs directly on World of V, an NFT Marketplace built on VechainThor. Discussions with other marketplaces are underway.

VORJ Free Account Limit Increases

We will shortly be increasing the limits on VORJ’s free account to give builders more freedom and flexibility to explore VORJ and the features that it has to offer. In the future, we will introduce new paid tiers for business and enterprise builders requiring greater scale. The free tier will always remain available.

Support for Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) Contracts

Initial implementation of OpenZeppelin DAO contracts has begun and will be a new feature that will be available in a future release of VORJ.

Access Control Integration

In a future release of VORJ users will be able to assign and revoke roles to accounts with different permissions. For example, a user could create and deploy a fungible contract and assign a “Minter” role to an account, enabling the account to mint tokens on the given contract.

Marketplace-as-a-Service (MaaS)

Work continues on the front-end design and back-end of our innovative MaaS feature, allowing community projects and enterprises alike to quickly and easily deploy customizable marketplaces to serve their needs.

More details on MaaS can be found in our previous update, and will include powerful features such as social logins and potentially, fiat-crypto gateways to abstract the visible layers of blockchain away to enhance the user experience and create a seamless onboarding experience.

Ledger Live Integration

Ledger Live integration continues to be worked on, with Ledger finalizing the review on our Pull Request. We hope to soon see the launch of vechain’s two main tokens, VET and VTHO, on Ledger Live, kicking off alongside a collaborative marketing campaign.

Rewards Dapp Updates

The revamped and newly standalone rewards Dapp is another key focus for our team, with the first iteration targeting the end of August for launch. Initial features include ‘connect wallet’, rewards claiming and a historical reward claim log. APIs have been finalized, and we have reworked the production environment.

Vechain Name Service (VNS)

We have been working with the VNS team to introduce human-readable addresses to the vechain ecosystem. There is no solid timeline for launch yet, however, work is underway, pending several dependencies.

Wallets

VeWorld Updates

VeWorld represents a new chapter for vechain’s wallet ecosystem, introducing many new features that will greatly elevate the user experience and capabilities of VechainThor.

We’re getting close to launch and can’t wait to unveil what we’ve been working on!

This month, we’ve been:

• Finalizing WalletConnect integration, creating sample code and instructions for integrating WalletConnect with Dapps
• Testing Ledger Bluetooth integration
• Finalizing preparations and submissions for app store review phase
• Kicking off internal user testing for iOS and Android

Ecosystem Tools

ETH <> VET Cross-Chain Token Bridge (Testnet Version)

The dev team have been working on a cross-chain token bridge, with successful tests carried out between vechain and Ethereum’s testnets.

This infrastructure helps vechain take another step towards more seamlessly opening up our ecosystem to other EVM blockchains and ensuring interoperability with the broader crypto-verse.

You can find and play with the token bridge here: https://bridge.vechain.best/#swap

$100k Community Developer Vechain Improvement Protocol (VIP) Campaign

We will soon launch a program specifically targeting the submission and development of new VIPs for the VechainThor blockchain. To incentivize developers, we’ll launch with $100k in funding for successful submissions and implementations, with foundation and community developers collaborating on successful submissions.

More details to follow next week in a separate release.

HardHat Upgrades

We continue to work on enhancing the popular Ethereum tool, Hardhat, adding the ability to incorporate clauses into transactions, enhancing it with vechain’s powerful modifications.

Learn more about vechain’s Clauses here.

Vechain Documentation Updates

Updating of the vechain documentation continues with the creation of a new resource to replace the existing documentation. You can find their new home here.

The objective of the new documentation resource is to refactor and improve the existing content in order to provide our community with more accessible, usable documentation.

Vechain Software Development Kit (SDK) Updates

A review and analysis of the existing developer tools continues. This comprises of reviewing and analyzing the existing tools, benchmarking against other chains developer tools and determining a set of features and enhancements for implementation.

Thor Devkit Upgrades

The Thor Devkit forms a core part of the developer catalogue of tools. The core dev team recently launched an updated version (v1.0.14 can be found here). Pysha3 users for version 3.11 can easily install this update, those on >3.6 are now using a new underlying library.

VIP-231 — Smart Contract Upgrade — VTHO Return Function

VIP-231 is an upgrade to smart contracts that returns accrued VTHO to an owner’s designated wallet.

The VIP is a work in progress, due for release later this month. You can find the link to the relevant GitHub here.

The Backbone of Tomorrow

This list is by no means exhaustive — our tech team is laying the foundations that are furthering our pursuit of building tomorrow’s sustainable economy alongside key partners like Boston Consulting Group and DNV, while empowering developers with the tools they need on a sustainable, scalable and inexpensive public blockchain.

Want to start building on vechain?

Check out our LinkTree for a list of resources to get you started!

About vechain

Vechain, headquartered in San Marino, Europe, is the curator of VechainThor, a world leading smart contract platform spearheading the real world adoption of blockchain technology.

Through leveraging the capabilities of ‘trustless’ data (information without intermediaries), smart contracts and IoT technologies, VechainThor has enabled solutions across a wide array of fields. Vechain now turns its attention to the greatest challenge of all — building digital ecosystems to drive sustainability and digital transformation on a global scale.

Visit https://www.vechain.org to learn more.