A Deep Dive: VeChain

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: Vchain, Anthony Day, Boston Consulting Group, Cardano
2. 5:00 – 10:00: V Better
3. 10:00 – 15:00: Vchain
4. 15:00 – 20:00: Vchain, Cardano, Polka Dot, V Better
5. 20:00 – 25:00: Vchain, V Better
6. 25:00 – 30:00: V Better, Vchain
7. 30:00 – 35:00: Vchain
8. 35:00 – 40:00: V Better, BYB (Build Your Body), Vchain
9. 40:00 – 45:00: Vchain, Mikuel Vanderpop, V Better, Wendy O
10. 45:00 – 50:00: Vchain
11. 50:00 – 53:30: Vchain

Notable quotes from "A Deep Dive: VeChain"

• Hi everyone, welcome back to another Real Vision Master Class and today we're talking about Vchain, what it actually does, why it's different, and what's in store for their…

  about Vchain · at 0:08

• My web three career chasing Ethereum founders. So I worked for Gavin Wood at Polka Dot, Charles Hoskinson at Cardano and Midnight. And at the end of those two stints, I got to…

  about Cardano · at 1:02

• Around. And so in the last couple of years, Vchain has been working on a proposition called V Better, which was co-created with BCG, Boston Consulting Group, around how do we…

  about V Better · at 3:42

• The point with Mugshot or EV or many of the others that make use of verification. BYB build your body is another. [snorts] the AI helps us to do verification offchain that can…

  about BYB (Build Your Body) · at 37:13

• Validators who are competing for your stake. we just announced today that Mikuel Vanderpop is going to be one of our validators along with Wendy O who joined us last week. You're going to see a number of different personalities.

  about Mikuel Vanderpop · at 41:00

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Anthony Day — Person · 1 mention · first at 0:21
  Does, why it's different, and what's in store for their future. I'm joined today by Anthony Day who offers a unique perspective as someone who has been working in web 3 for…
• Mikuel Vanderpop — Person · 1 mention · first at 41:04
• Wendy O — Person · 1 mention · first at 41:06
  Stake. we just announced today that Mikuel Vanderpop is going to be one of our validators along with Wendy O who joined us last week. You're going to see a number of different personalities competing for stake and also then as a.

Companies & orgs

• Vchain — Company · 31 mentions · first at 0:14
• UFC — Company · 3 mentions
• Cardano — Company · 2 mentions · first at 1:06
• Polka Dot — Company · 2 mentions · first at 1:06
  My web three career chasing Ethereum founders. So I worked for Gavin Wood at Polka Dot, Charles Hoskinson at Cardano and Midnight. And at the end of those two stints, I got to…
• Boston Consulting Group — Company · 1 mention · first at 3:48
  Years, Vchain has been working on a proposition called V Better, which was co-created with BCG, Boston Consulting Group, around how do we drive mainstream adoption of web3…
• BMW — Company · 1 mention

Products & tech

• V Better — Product · 10 mentions · first at 3:46
• Vorld — Product · 5 mentions
• VET — Product · 3 mentions
• VTHO — Product · 2 mentions

Concepts & topics

• BYB (Build Your Body) — Concept · 1 mention · first at 37:17

Full transcript with timestamps

0:08 Hi everyone, welcome back to another Real Vision Master Class and today we're talking about Vchain, what it actually does, why it's different, and what's in store for their future. I'm joined today by Anthony Day who offers a unique perspective as someone who has been working in web 3 for some time. you know, working across growth, strategy, adoption, and you recently joined Vchain as director of marketing. Anthony, it's great to have you with us today. How are you doing?

0:37 Pleasure to be here. Very happy. Thank you so much for the real vision audience for tuning in. Uh it's a great day for it.

0:43 Yeah, absolutely. And you know, kind of before we dive into it, um before you know, obviously we dive into Vchain and talk all about that, I want to start with you. Uh tell us a little bit about yourself and and how you ended up getting involved with Vchain. The short short version is I spent my kind of the early kind of eight years of my web three career chasing Ethereum founders. So I worked for Gavin Wood at Polka Dot, Charles Hoskinson at Cardano and Midnight. And at the end of those two stints, I got to a view of what do I really want to do next? I want to work for a project that has founders who are um visionary but still good good and relatable human beings as opposed to eccentric technology billionaires. I want to work for a project that has real utility where I can understand and I can describe the product and also where there's still a decent amount of headroom for growth whether that's in

1:36 terms of partnerships communicating the value proposition or just helping to grow something that's already there that's already great but needs more help and to that extent hadn't had a CMO for a couple years was dipping in doing kind of co-CEO CMO type of work and I thought Sunonny um would you would you have me in to help you and he said yes so here I am here you are and you know let's let's you know let's talk about Vchain because you know I think for those of us that have heard about Vchain those of us that have been in crypto for a long time it is one of the first blockchains that we kind of associated with utility real world utility right but for for someone who who hasn't heard about Vchain or is just hearing about it for the first time how do you usually explain what Vchain is and and what it was built to do

2:20 that's a great question thank you for that one so I think everybody in web 3 kind of has the oh yeah I remember Vchain type of story despite you know Kevin continuously been building since mainet launch in 2017 having a number of really successful B2B and B2C partnerships for for whatever reason and maybe the lack of the CMO hasn't helped but even so Vchain's always always had a passionate community has built its kind of reputation on B2B enterprise applications so supply chain traceability digital product passports with the likes of Walmart BMW more recently Lululemon and more coming soon the ability to build solutions for large organizations I think is the first thing right Sunny's background he was a CIO of Louis Vuitton one of the kind of large international MNC's and luxury so he understands complex supply chains height understands enterprise implementations that was the start right so 2017 to 2021

3:14 or so that was the the mainstay of you know enterprise adoption is going to be the next big thing for web 3 and honestly speaking it still is I think a lot of web 3 stopped caring anymore. I was like, well, I don't really care about cloud and I don't really care about CRM. It's like, well, this enterprise blockchain thing was great, but maybe it's not as exciting as everybody or the next narrative came along and people forgot that delivering on actual implementations of software and infrastructure is what we're here to do as opposed to just moving tokens around. And so in the last couple of years, Vchain has been working on a proposition called V Better, which was co-created with um BCG, Boston Consulting Group, around how do we drive mainstream adoption of web3 technology to everyday humans. How do we get blockchain in the applications in the phones of people every day? And so vb better.com has about 50 customerfocused

4:05 applications on it with each application doing one small thing which is to reward individuals for doing better for themselves, for the their community or for the planet every day. So you can do 50 actions every day and you can be rewarded in crypto for doing every single one of them.

4:19 The goal there is that it makes use of a number of the core crypto primit crypto primitives if not all of them to help build applications that work. But it's not just crypto, right? So sitting behind it is AI for analyzing photos or images or steps. It has a simple user experience. It has social signon. These are applications that everybody can use every day. And there's about 5 million users on the Veta platform, which I would argue is pretty decent for web 3 in terms of mass adoption. But for whatever reason, people don't look at that and say, "Oh, that's useful. That's adoption." the the narrative, the interest around actual utility, actual adoption in 2025 has kind of fallen away. And this is the saddest story. And so I'm here trying to pick up the fight for utility for to for people to care about, sure, token pumps are great or moving liquidity around is is a thing, but at the end of the day,

5:11 blockchain projects will survive if they have a revenue model, a user base, a customer base, and actual utility. Otherwise, it's really just speculation, which doesn't end well for anybody.

5:22 Yeah, I love that you said that. And, you know, you talk to a lot of people um you know, across all your different roles in web 3 and you know, you mentioned a bunch of big you know, companies as well that you know, you you speak with. What is like what is something when you're speaking to especially companies that may be not familiar with blockchain and what it does? Like what is something that you think makes it just instantly click for them that makes them say, "Oh, you know what? This makes sense to me. I want to start, you know, working and and building rails onto this.

5:49 So, I think it depends if you're talking to a B2B or a B2C audience. So, I'll I'll split the two, if you will. So, most of my career has been focused on building technology and software for Fortune 500 companies, large organizations. And so, when you talk to them, you've got to talk in terms of their issues, their needs. So when you talk to large multinationals you talk about a single source of data or you talk about trust in the provenence of data or you can talk in solution terms digital product passport has its own terminology now so when you talk to the European or more wide 2030 regulation around supply chain traceability you say okay this makes sense it's a system that can take data inputs that can be verified from multiple sources where you can create automations of activity and notification And that source of truth cannot be adjusted because it's needed to be of high quality for regulatory

6:41 approvals. Okay, that sounds like something useful for B2B. Or if you talk about addressing a particular problem like with Lululemon around product authenticity,

6:50 the ability to verify that a product is authentic and that the data underneath the verification is authentic because people are now counterfeiting verification platforms as well, right? The counterfeits are as smart as the anti-counterfeitters most of the time. These are products that you solve or problems that you solve and you talk in solutions mode. When we talk about Veta, there's again there's a B2B and a B2C angle here because there's a supply side and a demand side.

7:15 If you talk to an individual human, you're saying I'm going to reward you for doing 10,000 steps every day or I'm going to reward you for using a low emission vehicle or I'm going to reward you for bringing a reusable coffee mug instead of taking um plastic or paper waste every time you have a beverage. Right? And I'm going to give you a small incentive for doing that every day. and I'm going to connect you to a community of 5 million people who are as passionate about that as you and who are building other applications that can reward you for doing better every day.

7:41 Um or you know further out you can talk about the build your body app by built in partnership with UFC. We're saying in that case it's the story that's similar to UFC athletes who you know were 300 350 pounds found MMA and found their way into the octagon and now they're champions. We want you to train and and find fitness and find your fitness journey in the same way as these major athletes have. And we're going to reward you again for doing so. Maybe you just start by watching the workouts. Maybe you start participating and maybe that takes you further. That's something that as an individual you can talk about.

8:12 When you talk about Vet at large, what it actually is is we're tokenizing karma. We're tokenizing individual good actions or you can say that we're providing a verified source of sustainable impact. And so for some organizations that we talk to who have specific climate or sustainable or impact requirements, we're doing a lot of work or having a lot of conversations in fan engagement at the moment off the back of our work with the UFC. And in those models, they're saying, "Well, we want to demonstrate that our sport is having a positive impact or our team is having a positive impact on the world."

8:44 I say, "Well, okay, well, if you give every one of your fans access to Mugshot, every time they have a coffee, they're saving trees. If you give them access to EV earn and they have an electric vehicle, you're logging every time that they use low emission mileage and you can claim those miles on behalf of your customers. It's verified. It's trusted and we can serve it via an API. We are actually creating supply of sustainable impact on behalf of organizations where that matters. And then on the other side you can say actually if you're a business that wants to create that demand you're saying you know V better and its treasury will reward your customers for conducting and and taking impact or making impact every day. And so to that end you're creating um you supporting the demand side and the supply side as well. So it's tricky right because there's two there's kind of the B2B and B2C demand side supply

9:31 side of sustainable actions. But when you break it down into those terms, it becomes much clearer as to I didn't say the word blockchain once in that whole ramble. That's how you sell solutions, not crypto. Not blockchain. The crypto particularly when you talk about V better I am giving a monetary value reward to people in 100 countries every week without using a banking system or having to worry about payment rails or ibands or bank account numbers or whatever else just with a social sign on I can share small amounts of value and then I can have that value be converted into a voucher or a reward or an ability to pay in store through some of the other infrastructure we we bring together with our partners. that's really hard to do with dollars or Amazon gift cards.

10:19 And so that among many other features around the be better.com ecosystem are part of why and how we do it. But that's not where we start the conversation.

10:30 There are so many different threads we could pull on and and go from here. Just absolutely fascinating stuff and just so many different areas that you guys are working in. But kind of before we dive into, you know, exactly why like Vchain matters and, you know, how it works and all of that good stuff, I I do want to ask you because we did talk about narratives. You know, we we talked about, you know, sometimes people only care about they don't care about the narratives as long as the price is going up, right? So, so I want to ask you directly, what are um some of the biggest misconceptions that you've encountered uh that people still have about Vchain today?

11:02 Oh, wow. That's a good one. Um, so this it typically goes um, you know, I I'll I'll say what I'm doing or say where I'm working or so people see Vchain on there like, "Oh yeah, I remember Vchain. You guys were really big in 2018 2020." I was like, "Yeah, what do you remember?" "Oh, supply chain, supply chain, blockchain. That was a really big deal back then. That was that's a really big thing. What have you been doing since?" and and they've completely skipped either the depth and detail of the project which you know you can talk about either we weren't as interesting as the narrative of the day or we weren't shouting as loudly or ultimately I think the narratives around the industry have taken us closer towards the tokens casino games gambling memecoin end of things from a retail perspective now I think the saving grace and I say this with some trepidation because I'm not sure whether institutions have been the saving grace

11:57 of web 3 at this particular point in time. But if you believe that the next wave of capital entering web 3 is more institution focused, the level of due diligence on what is the utility of the programs I'm going to invest in, whether that's a stock, bond, equity, or crypto when it comes to looking at Vchain and others, you would want to believe that the organizations will be a bit more discerning. And so while all of retail is either staying away or trying to find a quick buck in memecoins because investment when you look at investing in a team that has a technology business Vchain stands almost alone in terms of what it's delivered particularly with Veta and some of the kind of big brand partnerships there's a red ocean over here of people trying to tokenize financial services traditional business which I think is is going to end up in disappointment for some because I think we've already seen that

12:48 the banks have shown that they'll build their in technology, not steal someone else's.

12:52 But that's kind of where we are at this point in time. Everybody from a retail perspective gets caught up in the get-richqu schemes, which the exchanges to some extent don't do a great job at helping to make easier because ultimately they just want transaction fees, right? It's not about being an industry leader or being able to represent the real value of the technology. It's really more about recently people have been representing the real value of gambling or investing in crypto and seeing a return. And sad fact of life is that most of the top 20 to 100 tokens have all dropped the same amount over the last 12 months. Not for want of trying, but in that mode, you're seeing actually the market doesn't see differentiation between projects that are genuinely building for utility and that have an active user base versus those that are scraping by a living through narrative and treasury but

13:44 aren't actually delivering real solutions. I'm not going to name names because I don't think that's fair and honestly I want everybody to win. But the current situation is hard and we're trying to fight to take back the narrative of utility and bring back fundamental season.

13:58 Yeah. No, absolutely. Utility is so important. It's it's just again, you know, we're going to talk about people only care about price going up, but utility is absolutely vital to this industry. And, you know, you mentioned, you know, the wave of institutional adoption, and we've been seeing that come, you know, fast these days, or just at least it's all in the media. It's the the narrative, you know, the JP Morgans of the world, and they're they're talking about building on all these different blockchains. Um, but these are groups that generally, you know, these organizations and large enterprises are groups that generally move pretty slowly, right? and they're riskaverse.

14:28 So, what do you think attracts what makes Vchain attractive to them uh to work with as opposed to you know maybe maybe someone else without naming names of course but you know what what why is why Vchain for for an large enterprise like UFC for example well with Vchain you can move very quickly so it's not about saying hey we've got a blockchain if you want to try and build an application on it then you know you can do that and then blockchain has the following properties that was the wave of I guess early and unfortunately for some cases still the messaging that says look our technology is really great. If you can conceive an application to build on it, you'll do really well. And enterprises will look at that and say, well, that's not how we consume applications in 2026. In fact, that's not how we consumed applications in 2015, let alone today. It's it's either software as a service or solutions or

15:17 nothing. You won't find native teams within enterprises building decentralized applications. They just won't. So you can partner and you can have app teams that build with you, but if you're a foundation going out with a with a protocol saying, "We've got a really great protocol." Enterprises are going to be turned off or they're just going to say, "Look, I can't I can't buy this. I can't consume this." Um, and worse if you have only a single token and the cost of your token or the value of a token goes up and the cost of my transaction fees goes up equally, every time you succeed, I pay more money,

15:48 which is a a bit of a um doom loop in terms of adoption. Let's call it that. So, with Vchain, there are actual solutions, right? So, tool chain and a lot of the supply chain enterprise focused solutions are ready to go now. We just signed a partnership with Record who have their own digital product passport solution which again is easy to integrate API focused. This is how you get solutions into organizations is build something that's useful for a use case that's known and established and then iterate as you go. On the V better side you've got 50 applications that are ready to go. Now you've got wallet infrastructure that anybody can use, custodial or non-custodial, and then you can plug the API into whatever either fan engagement or traceability solution you want to say these customers have signed up. I'm logging this amount of sustainable actions and here's the next step to engage these customers further.

16:40 You don't have to build from scratch. These are ready-made solutions. And I think that sets Vchain apart particularly outside of the as I said the red ocean DeFi tokenized banking stuff that's going to happen anyway. And honestly, that's necessary. But I think the intent with Vchain was always either to solve established non- finance problems with with decentralized technology

17:02 or to basically drive mass adoption in a way that is imperceivable that you're using blockchain, but the primitives that you get to use are so clearly obvious that that they're ready to go. you know what and and we one thing you know we we discussed here and I think anyone who has heard of Vchain knows like real world adoption right that's that's kind of the thing there you obviously talked about supply chain and everything like that but why do you think and and this gets talked about a lot you know with all about around crypto a lot of blockchains talk about real world adoption but very few actually kind of get that right so why do you think that's been so hard for the industry to actually get there and and provide that real world adoption seems like it's a buzzword at this point. What do you think has been the difficulty to actually getting there and why? And how is Vchain kind of filling

17:49 that gap? This one's really personal because I've I've had this struggle since 2016 when I started working with protocols. You get very excited about the primitives and the capabilities of what blockchain could do. And for the longest time, the message has been blockchain could do this.

18:07 You know, layer 2 might do that. App chains might do X Y and Zed. memecoins could be this and they never have been in reality because what those projects were trying to do was to raise treasury funds by selling potential and narrative in order to be able to then use those treasury funds to build something useful later or not and that depends a little bit on who you talk to. I think the the go-to market and partnerships teams of a number of layer ones and layer twos don't have as much real world experience. Great crypto experience, right? Really great at engaging with DAT builders, with DeFi protocols, with bridges, with the core infrastructure side of web 3, but less practical experience of delivering solutions to everyday organizations outside of web 3.

18:52 That doesn't have to be a problem if you're building for web 3. But if you're trying to build for mass adoption, you'll run out of road real quickly when your sales team or your solutions engineering team don't know how to build something for a particular use case where you don't have product market fit. You may have exceptional differentiation at a protocol level. But the sad fact of life is in 2026 most people don't care. Every blockchain does the same thing. It has block space. It has nodes. It has tokens. It has wallets. That's it.

19:20 Right? And smart contracts for automation of activity. Every blockchain has those things. So whether you put it on Ethereum, whether you put it on Vchain, whether you put it on Polka Dot, whether you put it on Cardano, ultimately at an application level, nobody cares any more than if your application is running on Google, Oracle, IBM or Amazon Cloud. Still a cloud, still has the basic primitives. And so we're not at a level of differentiation where the app where where the blockchain matters. So then it's about what you do with it that counts. And a lot of teams just don't have the vision to know what they are.

19:53 Layer twos are, oh well, we're adding, you know, we're adding extra scalability to the layer one. Cool. But for what?

20:01 Who's building there? Who is it that on your layer 1 needed that extra capacity? And how are you solving that problem for them such that you can fill your block space and get millions of transactions every week or month or whatever is meaningful to you. That's a part of it. We've got wound up in the narrative that, you know, we we build a better blockchain, build it, they will come. I think the second fallacy is the time at which it takes to drive actual digital transformation and again that's part of the experience of working with implementing real technology. We can spin up a token instantly right pump.

20:34 Fun has taught us that is that we can capture liquidity in minutes. Okay, great. But what has that actually solved other than helping us to perpetuate gambling? Not much. So, so if you're talking about actually changing physical processes or customer behavior or if you want UFC fans to do use the BYB app every day, part of that is you've got to drive the awareness. You've got to drive people there. You've got to look at how are they engaging with the application? How is the reward pool going? How does this fit into the rest of the digital journey for customers? How does the IT team feel about this? How does the finance team feel about this? Not saying that you have to do these things because it's sexy or fun. It isn't. But if you're going to be running a mainstream customerf facing application for tens if not hundreds of billions of people, these are the things you do. And those things don't transform overnight. In

21:21 fact, programs of that scale, if anyone's worked with any financial services institution, often take multiple years to come to fruition. And so we have the, let's call it the attention span in web 3 of the speed it takes to move liquidity, but we have the patience to see actual results of the same span. And we don't anticipate that actually driving real change is a long game and can actually run through multiple cycles. That's hard because the attention and the capital to the projects that are shouty that are loud and promise much but deliver little is where we end up today. and those projects that have consistently tried to grind out meaningful um usage, meaningful applications that are doing business development with enterprises and large organizations that deal cycles are 6 to 12 months each. It's like in crypto that's a lifetime. And so unfortunately, the appetite for seeing something

22:18 announced and then the 12 months until it actually happens, that's that works against any project that's trying to build something for real. And that's hard.

22:27 Yeah. I know. I love I love the the comment you made about the block space, right? And that and kind of creating if you build it that thinking of if you build it, they will come. I I I spoke with uh Sergio Silva, friend of Real Vision, who's really kind of changed my mind of this. And he he compared the the the new L1s and constant building of block space to kind of China's real estate market and and building a de building a demand for or building something for a demand that isn't quite there yet. I just love the way you me you mentioned that there. So,

22:57 let's talk about that demand with Vchain and and actually about how the system really works here. So, you you obviously mentioned V better. You guys have a dual uh dual token model as well. So, I want to talk about that and then you know we'll kind of go into Vchain and the Vchain Renaissance. Um but can you walk us through your guys's dual token model and why you guys uh designed it that way? It's super straightforward is that as I described before, if you have the governance token and the gas token be the same, every time the governance token appreciates, the cost of running your network goes up.

23:34 Anybody who's done anything material on Ethereum knows that when you're paying $100 or more for a transaction, when things are at peak, that's a problem. And you know, hence you s saw the proliferation of L2s around Ethereum. like look we cannot continue to operate if the gas token for our main network um keeps becoming massively inflated. deflated is fine, right? Cheaper transactions is good, but the predictability for those people who are building is a is a challenge. And so that was already one of the early design principles of Vchain is separate those two things. It didn't work with Ethereum. We didn't want to start creating this kind of weird layer 2 system where you sacrifice some of the security um or some of the features or some of the proximity to the main chain build differently. And you've seen a small number of other projects, one which I've worked for recently, also take up a two token model for exact same

24:24 reasons. Um, it's important to have predictability and stability um of gas fees and the ability to run the network. We also have delegated um transaction fees so you can obiscate away from the user the crypto side of it. So you can have sponsored gas fees or you can have sponsored um transactions on behalf of app users. So builders who want to avail of that functionality or enterprises who want to use blockchains without forcing their customers into a crypto journey can do that. The the simplest way I can describe it is it is for mass adoption.

24:55 Don't surface the crypto if you don't have to. So let's talk a little bit about Veter now. You know I think things seem to get pretty interesting here. You mentioned it a few times. So can I want to ask you directly though what what exactly is Veter and and why is it so why is it such a compelling uh thing in in for your guys' ecosystem?

25:15 Gotcha. So V better or veter.com is is designed to be a dedicated platform for apps that help reward people for doing better every day. As I said before that's better for yourself. So, it could be personal health, movement, dietary choices, good for your community, things for the neighborhood, cleanups, even kind of picking up after your dog, which I've seen any number of comments on social media be like, what the hell blockchain is, you know, requiring people to take pictures of dog poop. I was like, yeah, exactly that, right?

25:44 This isn't this isn't some sophisticated DeFi synthetic derivative of some nonsense that you're going to get rugged from. This is just doing a good thing, right? How many people have walked through a park and be like, you know what it is? Actually, this sucks. Why don't people pick up after themselves? If there was a small incentive for doing so, maybe we'd see a little change. And it's not about, you know, mass adoption overnight. It's like these small changes and these small incentives will help people to do better every day. Take pride in the community or the location or the neighborhood they're in. And [snorts] maybe if they're up to it, that extends further into helping to to do something good for the planet in terms of recycling or using low emission vehicles, taking sustainable journeys when you go to work or whatever else it could be. There's 50 different moments during the day from your first coffee

26:26 when you wake up in the morning right through to switching your phone off and taking a mindfulness moment with Restify at the end of the day. These are all ways that can help people do better. And we have fans, users in our community who are using 20 or 30 of these apps every day. They're not making millions of dollars. That's not the point. But these apps are helping them to organize their habits to help them feel better for doing better. And obviously there's a financial reward underneath that as well, which is that little nudge that just helps make it worthwhile that allows them to get into an ecosystem where there's also staking and earn interest on their karma. Um, metaphorically speaking, these are small features that help us to help people do better every day. And this is not a these apps are not things that are unique to crypto people. you know, if you're a real big DeFi head, you're

27:12 like, "Oh my god, yeah, you know, hanging my laundry outside and getting a reward." That really chimes with the nature of my being in the market and being kind of financially experienced. It's not. It's designed to be relatable to people every day so that we can help anybody in any country, anywhere in the world take better actions and earn doing so. That's the goal. And I said, we've got some really passionate builders. We got 50 projects in the ecosystem so far. There'll be more. About 5 million users of those different applications. We're doing something in the order of about a million sustainable transactions or s a million better transactions every week at this point in time and it's sort of growing exponentially.

27:47 Why does it work? A number of different factors. So thing one, all of the different crypto primitives are being used here. So first off, Veter is a Dow. So you have a treasury, you have a token structure, you have a unique specific token for Veter. We use a different token for V better than for Vchain and for the Vchain uh VTO gas token because we wanted Veta in isolation to have its own tokconomic to have its own value. We're basically saying that this application, this platform should have the value of a sustainable action because there is demand. Organizations that want to register sustainable actions for their customers and then you have a supply side which is people doing the things and so that deserves or needs or requires its own economics, hence its own token. If you were using the Vchain token in there, it would be misrepresentative of what's actually going on. um or or the Veta could then

28:37 be affected positively or negatively about what else is going on in Vchain world. So you have a token. Why a token? Because you're able to send value instantly globally all around the world. You have wallets and self-custody of assets. So people control it. They can do what they want with it. It's real value. It's portable. It's theirs to control. You don't then have to go through a weird financial loop that makes it complicated in terms of banking, specifically globally. that token is interchangeable between the different applications in the platform.

29:06 So you can earn it on those 50 different applications. You have one single unit of value. So it's a little bit like a loyalty point in that way. So it's easy to spin up for builders on the ecosystem. You don't have to create your own token and go through your own compliance registration legal entity token generating event which is massive headache for for builders. Those who are in web 3 already and have a you know real real desire to do it so be it. But for those applications who just want to help people do better every day, we provided the fundamentals, the primitives already built. So essentially all you had to do is run your app, integrate and the community votes whether your app is going to make it or not. The community on Veta also vote for for the reward so that what share of the treasury goes to which applications on a on a monthly basis. And so that's important because that means that you're

29:51 producing apps and rewarding apps that the community actually value. And so you're creating that um loop of communitydriven action, people who are interested in similar apps, and that drives growth from one app to the other as as as you go. So you've got that virtuous cycle as well. We're making use of all of the crypto primitives, but keeping it super simple, easy for builders, easy for users, apps available on the app store with social sign. This is mass adoption. This is crypto made easy. In fact, this isn't crypto anymore,

30:22 right? This is this is using crypto or blockchain technology, but in reality, what you're doing is you're you're creating a platform for good that is scalable and that people are using. That's that's that's the Vchain mission is we're a blockchain with purpose intending to deliver deliver that mass adoption. And that's what veter.com represents for us and the people that use it.

30:44 Yeah. And you you know what you said there is very impact. I think it's very powerful, right? and and kind of incentivizing good behaviors uh for for people that it's going to make themselves better. And I I have seen several of these apps spin up in web 2. So just very fascinating to see how web 3 communities kind of use this uh to benefit their community and overall in the ecosystem overall. So you mentioned kind of several apps in in kind of the health and wellness area um and and probably many others that have real world utility. What is one that people may not be aware of that you've found, I guess, surprising in terms of how much traction it has actually gotten?

31:23 Wow. Now, I'm not allowed to have favorites here, right? Um, so I'm I'm I'm not going to pick favorites, but I'll I'll start with the one that I think is the is the gateway um app because it's the one that more or less everybody can go to every day. Not everybody washes, you know, drives their laundry outside. Not everybody owns an electric vehicle. Not [snorts] everybody takes public transport every day. Not everybody wants to get into a kind of a health and fitness routine straight away. That's kind of heavy. The app is called Mugshot. Mug as in coffee mug shot as in mugsh shot of coffee. Mugsh shot. Essentially what we're saying is if you bring a reusable mug, if you drink two beverages a day, could be tea, could be coffee, you take a photograph of the mug with the coffee in it.

32:06 Obviously, if it is coffee, the AI will interpret whether in real time you are actually drinking coffee or tea and that the mug is made of paper plastic or is reusable, you'll be rewarded. Super simple. Twice a day, take a picture of your coffee or your tea, and if you're using a reusable mug, then you're good. And so, in those two moments, if you're tempted to go to a coffee shop outside, bring your own mug. If you're tempted to drink something in the afternoon, don't use a single-use cup. We've had millions and millions of submissions on the app.

32:38 There's over two million users on Mugshot right now. This is the easiest way of demonstrating X to earn among others. The one that's most sticky, EV. Uh EV rewards you for using low emission vehicles. So the nice thing about that is we use the Tesla API or we've now expanded into over 30 different vehicle types. But if you register your vehicle and you use the uh the connector, the the Tesla API, it will register that you've charged the vehicle and you'll be rewarded simply for charging your vehicle. I think we've got almost 100% retention on EV users because literally you connect it to your vehicle and every time you charge it, you earn rewards.

33:15 Simple. There are more complicated journeys. There are more sophisticated ones. But people go to it. I said Restify rewards you for switching your phone off. You literally have to brick the phone for 30 minutes, then you get it back and you earn your rewards, right? Forced mindfulness, as sad as that sounds, or at least being rewarded for being mindful. I know that's something that a lot of people practice anyway. So, why not be have a little nudge and little reward for doing so? And I said, there are 50 others. I'm not allowed to have favorites. I don't have favorites, but that cover pretty much every stage of your journey every day.

33:45 And so, it's very, very easy to get into. And the nice thing is that these apps can all be surfaced from the VWorld wallet. Vorld is Vchain's super app wallet. It's combination of a crypto wallet and a super app. A little bit like WeChat. So you can go into the VWorld wallet and you can access Mugshot, Stepper, Green Cart, a bunch of the different applications from your crypto wallet. So imagine if MetaMask had 50 apps in it that rewards you every day for for doing good. That's what VWorld represents. So if there's one thing I would encourage people to do, it would be to download VWorld. go to vorld.com and start your either crypto or sustainable actions journey there.

34:24 I mean, who doesn't want to earn uh for doing actions that are going to benefit yourself, right? And I love that you mentioned uh the coffee one because coffee everyone can I mean most people obviously can relate to it's the second most consumed beverage in the world. So, uh I I can see why that is definitely a good gateway. It's something that people really just understand. Coffee sustainability makes sense to me.

34:45 That's it. And just backtrack for yourself, right? In the last two weeks, was every single one of those coffees or teas that you drank out of a reusable mug? Or how much paper or plastic were you personally responsible for over those last two weeks, wherever you were? Think about, yeah, you know what? That's fine. But there are so many nice reusable mugs now. There's beautiful different ones with different colors made of, you know, usable materials. I like this one because it's enormous. It's the size of my head. Um, you know, this this will either tell people that I'm really small or that my coffee mug is really large. And it's something that people can relate to. You're just getting rewarded for doing the right thing and just you can feel better about it, which is, I think, a meaningful pursuit. Even if the crypto purists are like, "Hey, you and your coffee mugs and your dog poop. This is not the mass

35:31 adoption we signed up for." Um, well, what else do we have? Well said. So you mentioned something that I want to touch on as well because it's obviously it's such a super hot narrative right now which is AI right and you mentioned how when you take the photo the AI can kind of you know see see what it is so can you talk a little bit about how you guys are thinking about AI and how it fits into your you know overall vision and your ecosystem.

35:59 Sure thing because I think in web 3 as ever we've overthought this one. So I think there's three horizons to think about AI or that we think about AI. Thing one is at the protocol level. Thing two is at the application level and then thing three is at the customer level. And I'll just describe what I mean by the third one. There are decentralized AI protocols that are looking at compute storage supporting artificial intelligence with decentralized infrastructure. That's super sophisticated. And whether the oligopoly will allow for that to happen in web 3 or not, who knows in in the world more widely even. But the way we look at it is that that AI is a tool is infrastructure that you can make use of at an application level first. So the verification of activity can happen with AI. The digital identity can be a blockchain based one with a c custodial non-custodial wallet and then you have

36:50 the blockchain for verification and automation of activity. That's a regular application stack just with AI and some blockchain added to the bottom of it and the top and obviously with crypto and tokens in the middle. This is how we build applications folks. It doesn't need to be more sophisticated than this. And so when I think about blockchain and AI, it's not either or. It comes together at the application level and they work together beautifully. As is the point with Mugshot or EV or many of the others that make use of verification. BYB build your body is another. [snorts] the the AI helps us to do verification offchain that can support transactions onchain. So thing one, we're already using AI and blockchain at scale in the V better ecosystem. So there's that. I talked then about AI as customers. So whether we like it or not, it's noticeable that there's a lot of talk around the agentic

37:40 web, the talk of agents operating on our behalf, doing tasks in an automated way and we're prepared for that. So a couple of months back we released the Veta 3.0 white paper which talks about how do we prepare for agents being active participants in web3 ecosystems.

37:59 Now people say at the moment you know we don't want the bots we don't want bot traffic and you know fake engagement fake uh content fake impressions fake followers any of this sort of stuff you know that's fine before long we will want the bots. it will be the other way around because these bots will be the agents with intents behind them from individuals and humans with capital or positions of influence whatever else it could be. So for Veta what we're ready for now is the ability for agents to be submitting proposals for agents to be building their own apps and for agents to be supporting humans in doing better actions every day. So that better token that sits under the V better ecosystem is a token that will be used by agents to issue rewards to pay for impressions to receive on behalf of humans and then potentially delegate stake or do whatever they choose to with if it's earned right at a at a most simple level

38:52 you'll see agents behind applications like Vorld where you'll say to the agent, "Hey agent, schedule my day so that I maximize the benefits and remind me when I have to use the or maybe it'll do it for you and it'll automatically claim your rewards and stake them without you really noticing. That's AI optimization. That's agents working in the background um right up to agents actually becoming businesses themselves and launching apps on Veta. All of this is technically feasible today. The sophistication of the agents, the integration of the agents, we haven't seen yet. That's coming. um and the proliferation of agents acting on behalf of humans every day with crypto wallets. Again, we're still at the early stage of seeing that, but this is the future that we see coming next. And the nice thing is we're aware of it. We've presented our view of how it's going to play out on the the veter.com

39:41 3.0 white paper. And the next few months and years, we're going to be slowly integrating that as we see it reach critical mass. That's that's what we're ready for. That's the blockchain and AI as we see it, not necessarily at the protocol level right now.

39:59 So, V Vchain has a lot of there's it's an expansive ecosystem, right? We we've talked about V better and obviously how that impacts just you know everyday people and incentivizes behaviors. We've talked about Vchain at the end and enterprise level and and all the different organizations you guys are working with. I think earlier this year you guys uh you guys announced Vchain Renaissance as well. So when you look ahead to you know kind of 2026 and beyond for Vchain what excites you the most and then I also want to extrapulate take that question and ask you also what excites you the most about crypto space in general as well. All right. So, it's been a very big year from a technical standpoint on Vchain and you mentioned the renaissance. I probably haven't done justice to the engineers working on the Vchain side, the product teams who have spent countless hours, days, nights, weekends renovating the protocol to the

40:51 place that it is today. Stargate as a staking platform is a is a fantastic experience in terms of engaging with um what staking can look like with validators who are competing for your stake. Um, we just announced today that Mikuel Vanderpop is going to be one of our validators along with Wendy O who joined us last week. You're going to see uh a number of different um personalities competing for stake and also then as a result competing for good causes. Wendy in her case, she's offering 10% of all her staking rewards to good causes.

41:24 These are different ways for people to engage with validators rather than these just being kind of nameless numbers or a series of X's and Y's that return yield. These are personalities helping to engage a community. And I think that is a huge lift for us. So anybody who holds VET today, important notice, if you want your staking rewards, now we're in the Hayabusa era. Staking is is now with intent. So you no longer passively earn your VTHO tokens just by holding BET in your wallet. That's to encourage participation to encourage engagement to improve the security of the network and also that's going to reduce um the VTO issuance. So make the VTO token more deflationary. Those tokconomics are good for holders. Those tokconomics are good for people who are trying to engage with the network. So where we are right now in v in in the hayabusa era in the staking era or the sort of um delegated

42:17 proof ofstake era for vchain this is a big step forward for us it should be simple it should be easy as I said before v world is your wallet stargate is the platform to get engaged with staking that's pretty much all you need to know but from a technical standpoint a huge amount of work has gone on under the hood what am I excited for in 2026 I mean focusing away from the market and the fear and greed index and continuing to bring veter applications to organizations that genuinely care for what we've built. [clears throat] I certainly want to do more with the UFC and get closer to Vchain technology being there for fan engagement every day. So, I would love the fans of the UFC to be using Vet apps. I'd love that functionality to be in the mainstream UFC app. you start seeing a billion fans starting to do something other than just stare at highlights or buy tickets or buy merch. You know, imagine the power

43:09 of a billion fans doing one action every day, maybe for themselves, maybe for their community, maybe for the world. That's real engagement. Watching videos and consuming content is not engagement for me. And so that's a big part of the story. I want to find more partners out there in web 2 or web 3 who have a demand for sustainable actions who can see the 50 different apps that we built on be better and say actually yeah I would love my customers to be engaging with these apps. I'd love to reward them and I'd love to be able to count on those actions as part of my commitment to engaging my customer base. That's a really really big drive for us.

43:43 Obviously, there's more technical upgrades as well. JSON RPC and a few other kind of technical improvements coming with the Interstellar technical upgrade, but ultimately for me, it's about more mass adoption, more partnerships, more actual everyday usage. If the market values it, okay, fair enough. But ultimately, at a certain point, you're then generating revenue, your business is sustainable, and you can continue to grow. We're not moving tokens around and praying that the token goes up. We have a customer base. We have a demonstrated track record and we continue to proliferate that. That's what Vchain has been since 2017 and I think it's going to be more of the same. The final question you said, what am I excited about for crypto for 2026?

44:24 Oh my god. I mean, the last few months have been exhausting. So it's it's it's frustrating to be working in an industry where so many of the macro factors point towards the ease of implementation, clearer regulatory standards, liquidity and access from institutions, a more discerning investor base. And yet here we are at the end of 2025 being like, yeah,

44:50 didn't quite go as quickly as we expected. But I think within that comes a warning. is that actually transformation whether that be at a regulatory level whether that be a government level whether that be a financial services industry level doesn't happen in 12 months right anything that happened to price action in 12 months post Trump coming into power and that being the shock wave that kind of benefited the rest of the industry is still purely narrative or speculation because the actual implementation hasn't happened at scale yet

45:18 in as wide a way as people anticipated and so I go into 2026 with cautious optimism because every next month is a step further towards clearer regulation is a step further towards technology implementation and QA is a step forward towards more everyday applications making use of web3 technology that's the difference between digital transformation and between crypto speculation unfortunately half of our industry is an investment playground the other half is a technology business and I'm excited that the technology business can continue to thrive that we don't have to keep second guessing regulatory guidance from one week to the next and we can spend more time focused on innovation and implementation. That's what I look forward to in 2026.

46:04 Yeah. Well, that just talking to a lot of people, I think that that regulation is like that's a big one, right? And and I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you because you've you've been working in in many ecosystems. You've seen growth, right? You you you've put in the groundwork. Um and and you were there in the early days when kind of we were hoping for that clarity and now I guess you know with I guess with the new administration we're we're starting to get the talk of that clarity. Have you seen that impact the way you know Vchain and others have have approached the system? Is that helping? Is are we seeing kind of you guys feel more confident in releasing new products and services without being worried about the SEC coming down and and things like that?

46:44 Yeah. So predating me and Vchain, Sunny and team have always been regulatory driven. So we were one of the earliest teams to be Mika regulated or Mika compliant in terms of tokens, Vchain, VTO and better. We're constantly monitoring regulatory standards in terms of tokens, in terms of our engagement with exchanges. That's the underpinnings of it, right? The next part is building solutions that organizations can actually consume. And that's been day one for Vchain since 2017 and since even before. So from that perspective, it's it's pretty easy on our side. That's not something that actually we've been as hindered by compared to others. Anybody launching token generating events, anybody looking at marketing or communications around their projects, the number of days, weeks, months wasted in a year in fear of regulation or in fear of lack of regulation and the SEC's punitive actions, that time can now be returned back to

47:40 projects in terms of innovation, in terms of business and go to market focus, which now they don't have to be second guessing themselves. It was like trying to run with a 10 kilo weight dragging behind you, maybe even a bigger one. Or or like trying to sail away with the anchor down. I've got other analogies, but I won't bore you with them. You're you're you're taking the handbrake off. There you go. I've got a third. You're taking the handbrake off of go to market action for every protocol out there. That's a good thing for most, maybe not so much of a good thing for others, but genuinely trying to generate innovation and growth in a climate of fear is so much harder. And honestly, I'm it is it is a great relief to be able to do what we do today.

48:22 So, I'm someone like let's say I'm someone who's listening to this conversation and I'm I'm just learning about Vchain for the first time and you guys obviously like we we touched on you have an expansive ecosystem. There's so many different things going on, so many ways people can enter that ecosystem. What would be your advice for the best place for someone to start to get a better understanding and start actually using this and seeing what this technology can actually do for them? Where should I start? vld.com. First things first, download the VW World wallet. That is your portal to a number of the different Veter apps that will reward you for doing good things every day. That's the first thing, right?

48:58 Reward yourself. Start doing some better actions. Start seeing which apps start to fit well with your user experience or start to fit well with your appreciation of how you like to to run your day and your routine. Start drinking coffee from reusable mugs. Start getting your steps in. Start eating healthy. And we'll reward you for it. Thing one. If that excites you, then that might be your chance to say, "Well, actually, you know what it is. Um, this is every crypto is undervalued at this point in time. So maybe this is an ecosystem that I value.

49:31 This is something that I I'm interested in in being more invested in than just with better tokens. And so you can do that in the app as well. So you can buy VET in the app. You can earn VET. Sorry, you can earn better tokens through the Veter apps. And that's super simple. If you want to do a bit more reading, you can go to vchain.org. There's more case studies on there. There's more detail on there. All the white papers are there if you're that kind of technical person. If you're a builder or somebody who wants to build the next Veter application, there's grants. There's loads of support. developer relations team is there to help you. Community team is there to help you. Again, the builder hub or the builders page on vchain.org, you can find all the details for grants and technical support. So, that's super easy for you. And as always, you can follow us on socials um on XVchain official. We've got Instagram, we've got

50:16 Tik Tok, we've got Medium, we got a website, we've got Telegram, we've got Discord, we've got Discourse, we've got I don't think we have Snapchat and BBO, but we're on the on the way to adding them. Um, we have all the channels, but honestly, just start with Vorld. Download the wallet, check out some of the apps, read a little bit more about what it is we're trying to do. And if you're into fundamentals, if you're into real adoption projects that are making a real difference, uh, and a community that that is as passionate about it as you are and we are, this is a good place to be.

50:47 Fantastic. And and Anthony, before I let you go today, what is one thing you you just we talked about so much and I I think you've really educated us on where this world can go and I love and I really appreciate and want to thank you for actually giving us real world examples and real ways that we can use this to benefit us. Um so what is one thing you want people to take away from this conversation? If they if they forget everything else, what is one thing you want them to remember from this?

51:13 This is a bit self- serving, isn't it? If there's one thing, download VWorld. go to vorld.com. If there's two things, the broader message, which is what I think you meant. Um, the current manifestation of web 3 and crypto is a little bit broken. For whatever reason, the industry has lost its way in some sense of greed, in some sense of quick buckism. The investing side of web 3 versus the technology side of web 3 has has diverged. And unfortunately, the louder, noisier, sexier, and potentially more interesting quickbuck crypto investment side of web 3 has has the wheel right now.

51:52 My desire would be for people to realize that that's not enduring. That's not lasting. That's a constant cycle of ups and downs. That there are teams in web 3 that are building real solutions for real organizations that you can use every day on your phone, in your wallet. That's what progress looks like. That's what mass adoption looks like. There are a small number of projects that are tied to the fight for utility. Bchain is one of them. And we want more people to care about it. We want more people to ask, "What have you built? Who's using it?

52:24 How does this help? What is it useful for? Where is the actual adoption?" And the more people who join the fight for adoption, the fight for utility, the better progress, the better chance we have of Web3 surviving. because if we continue with the noisy uh memecoin crowd at the wheel, we may not have a web three to look forward to.

52:43 All right, everyone. So, for everyone watching, go to VW World, get a VW wallet. You can find out more information on in our description as well with all the links. Um because listen, for all of those people that just think crypto is about buying and holding and just speculating, this is this is a technology that's taking over. This is going to be our future. So, why not learn how to how to interact with it and learn what it can do for you? And I think that's that's something that uh that Vchain is doing as we've heard in this conversation today. Anthony, absolute pleasure having you. Would love to have you back. Uh thanks again for joining us.

53:17 Anytime. Thank you, Bjan. Thank you for the great questions. Thank you guys for listening in and appreciate you.

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "A Deep Dive: VeChain"?

In order: 0:00 Vchain, Anthony Day, Boston Consulting Group, Cardano; 5:00 V Better; 10:00 Vchain; 15:00 Vchain, Cardano, Polka Dot, V Better; 20:00 Vchain, V Better; 25:00 V Better, Vchain; 30:00 Vchain; 35:00 V Better, BYB (Build Your Body), Vchain; 40:00 Vchain, Mikuel Vanderpop, V Better, Wendy O; 45:00 Vchain; 50:00 Vchain.

What is mentioned in this Real Vision Presents episode?

14 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Vchain, V Better, Vorld, UFC, VET, Cardano. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "A Deep Dive: VeChain"?

The episode runs 54 min; the transcript is about 10,575 words in 91 timestamped sections.

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