VeChain Thor mainnet has officially been launched, meaning that we can finally say goodbye to VEN tokens. Coinmarketcap renamed them to VET tokens on August 3rd and so far these haven’t fared much better than their predecessor. Launching with a price of $0.015156 USD/201 satoshi, the token has been in a continual slide ever since. As there hasn’t been almost any positive price action during the past week, VET managed to fall to its current levels of $0.006859 USD (drop of 21.29% in the last 24 hours)/114 satoshi (drop of 17.05% in the last 24 hours). VET token’s daily trade volume is currently at 2248 BTC and with a market cap of $381,294,193 USD, VeChain remains the 21st most valuable currency on the market.
VeChain, a project that’s aiming to become the dominant player in the blockchain-based supply chain management industry, has recently launched its mainnet. Naturally, this meant that the project which originally came to life on top of Ethereum’s blockchain now needed to swap its ERC 20 tokens (VEN) into tokens from its own, freshly launched blockchain (VET). Prior to this, the project performed an X-Node binding contest where X-Node owners were given an opportunity to bind their nodes and receive significant rewards for that. X-Nodes are basically nodes that provide special benefits for the early supporters of the VeChain platform, which include:
- More VeChain production than standard nodes
- Early start of node maturity periods
- Exclusive participation in VeChain Ecosystem ICO whitelists
- Official designations to build and represent the community
The contest ended on August 10th and had three phases during which over 100 million VET tokens were distributed to Mjolnir X, Thunder X, Strength X and VeThor X nodes.
The last round of ‘Early Bird X Node' rewards have been sent out! By increasing 8.95%, 16.5B VET haven been locked up in round 3. In total over 220M VET were awarded!
Reminder, dropping below the 3rd snapshot balance before Sept 1 results in the loss of X Node status. pic.twitter.com/kh5YIbEEyz— VeChain Foundation (@vechainofficial) August 10, 2018
After the X-Node binding service was completed, the company officially initiated the VET token swap within VeChainThor wallets. A full manual describing everything you need to know about the token swap has been released by the team and can be seen here.
Alongside these events, VeChain decided to introduce a “Token Swap Lucky Draw” lottery that will last from July 26th to August 31st. Anyone with over 50 thousand VET in their wallet will be eligible for this lottery.
“Starting from July 26th, we will announce the hash of the first VeChainThor Blockchain block after 0am (UTC+8) every day as well as a random number between 1–40. The random number selected represents the position within the last 40 characters of the block hash. All the addresses of which the last character is the same as the randomly selected character will be awarded 1,000 VET,” explained the official VeChain announcement regarding this event. Here’s an example of the competition in action.
The team also announced they are introducing X-Node maturity period waiving, which you can read about in the link above. Finally, VeChain is aware that not all addresses with 600 thousand + VET will get in on the X-Node program; therefore they’ve promised to randomly pick 5 such addresses on August 18th (12 pm UTC+8) and grant them the X-Node status.
Learn more about Cex.io in our extensive guide about this exchange.
Frankly, it’s all a bit confusing and complicated, and the VeChain team has decided to sum up everything that happened in the post mainnet launch period. A “revised timeline” for VeChainThor wallet migration and token swap has been released; this publication should help ease in people that were perhaps out of the loop with everything that happened in the last couple of weeks.
As a supply chain management product, VeChain will depend heavily on companies adopting it and starting to use it. Several projects have confirmed their intentions to do so in the future. BMW partnership is certainly the most often cited deal the company has made so far. Additionally, projects like Cahrenheit, Totient, Safe Haven, Esprezzo, have confirmed their intentions to utilize VeChain as the underlying layer for their blockchain solutions.
VeChain still has a lot of questions to answer before becoming a legitimate project. We still don’t know who will be the Authority Nodes of the network (nodes that will validate blocks) or how will they operate/be replaced. First enterprises and projects are yet to run their apps on the VeChain mainnet. There are also questions regarding the mainnet throughput generated by enterprises, VTHO token tradability, direct fiat gateways into the mainnet etc. As long as the real world application of this token and the project itself aren’t there, we shouldn’t expect its price to decouple from BTC and start growing once again.
Which fully explains the “pump and dump” scheme occurring now with 48% gain, soon to be wiped away with many peoples money while some whale blows through their hole swimming away with theirs.