Strong Fundamentals
While my portfolio has steadily grown with solid picks like ETH and XMR, my biggest wins have come through the smaller cap coins I’ve picked with strong business fundamentals.
VeChain reminds me of REQ, but on an entirely different level. REQ was the first small cap crypto I bet hard on because of my own intuition rather than Reddit shilling. I put in 30% of my portfolio in at $0.05. REQ just made sense. YCombinator backing meant the team had been vetted by a startup incubator that looks through thousands of teams. Winning the ING startup competition over 60 other teams reinforced this. The team was relatively unknown, but they had previous success with Moneytis and were delivering in their weekly updates and on their roadmap. This wasn’t just hype, the team had true value and the market hadn’t caught up to it. I’ve had a few other coins recently go 7x+ with smaller investments by using a similar criteria (strong use case, team, and execution) in PBL, HST, and ENJ, and I feel this same way with VeChain.
VeChain’s team is incredibly strong. The CEO of VeChain, Sunny Lu, was the CIO of Louis Vuitton China. This is different than simply ex-Google, ex-Facebook, ex-whatever; Sunny lead a globally renowned company's entire information technology portfolio in the industry he's now creating a solution for. Sunny Lu is one of the strongest CEOs to lead a crypto project, especially since VeChain is solving an issue that HE HIMSELF previously had to deal with in his previous role. Sunny brings with him invaluable business leadership experience as well as industry connections to VeChain.
Secondly, I don’t think VeChain’s status as a PwC portfolio company (https://www.pwccn.com/en/press-room/press-releases/pr-150517.html) is taken as seriously as it should be.
Quoted from that press release on PwC’s site:
“This incubation programme will help VeChain to accelerate their development, by providing the company with access to the Hong Kong and South East Asia markets and strategic advice leveraging on PwC extensive global network.”
PwC is a monster in the accounting industry. Their revenue is 37 BILLION dollars annually. Google PwC right now. The Google summary of PwC lists Ramund Chao as the chairperson of the PwC China branch. You can find a picture of him with the Co-Founder of VeChain at the signing ceremony in that link.
I have no doubt VeChain has used PwC judiciously to broker their way into all of partnerships and refine their marketing, and PwC will push VeChain as a solution to their clients. VeChain is a strategic move by PwC to beat their competitors in the blockchain space, and they have and will invest heavily in their success. Through PwC, VeChain essentially has a foot in the door of their entire client base, which literally spans almost the entire Fortune 500.
From PwC's own website:
In the last year, we have helped 419 (84%) of the companies in the Fortune Global 500 list, and 423 (85%) of those in the US Fortune 500 list.
Yeah. PwC is a serious asset to VeChain.
Then the partnerships. The Chinese government with Gui’an. The recently announced Healthcare Co. is a $6.5 billion dollar company, and they’ve agreed to put 20 million chips a year into the VeChain system for 5 years. Partnerships with the largest RFID chip producer and #1 and #2 NFC chip producers in the world. The car manufacturer Renault. DNV GL, a classification company with revenue $23 billion. News that there are several NDAs with their largest partnerships dropping imminently.
Ask yourself, what would happen if even a single of these announcements dropped for a similar sized project?
VeChain as a dApp Platform and Why Difficulty in Transition Change Management Will Push Enterprise Adoption
In the AMA the other day Sunny announced that VeChain is no longer just supply-chain logistics and counterfeit protection, but a fully fledged Enterprise dApp platform, with scalability up to 10,000 tx/s. With a development team of 40+, previous experience as a CIO leading tech, and overall delivery on everything thus far, let’s just assume it will be a fully capable network.
I answered the question of “Why would companies choose VeChain over NEO/ETH/ADA/etc?” the other day, and I think it deserves further exploration.
I have a background in Industrial Engineering, the practice of engineering processes/systems for maximal efficiency, but work in IT software implementation at a large tech company. I’ve worked in the implementation of several different software systems, for several different organizations. Transitioning businesses onto new technology is INCREDIBLY difficult.
Most people simply don’t understand the amount of work it takes to set up an enterprise information system. When you go to work and you hate that piece of software that never works just right, some team of systems analysts like myself, developers, and business employees probably spent months customizing it to fit the workflows of the business. These systems don’t work out of the box, they usually need to be painstakingly configured. People need to be train Why am I bringing this up? Blockchain is an emerging technology, and getting companies to adapt their workforce to it is going to be a challenge for any business (As a side note, I believe Sunny Lu's previous CIO experience makes him uniquely qualified to lead VeChain and guide the CIOs of other companies to adapt to their blockchain). As I said earlier, I work in a Fortune 50 tech company with products you likely use on a daily basis and even we have incredible difficulty migrating onto new software and workflows, and supporting the system. I recently implemented an IBM product earlier in 2017 and we are still working out the kinks.
Ease of Implementation and Minimizing Enterprise Risk
I’ve been part of the selection process of what information systems to implement to solve a problem, and our selection process isn’t necessary “what system is the best?” What tends to rule the day is the product with the highest cost/benefit ratio, which hinges on ease of implementation, and confidence in the vendor. If I'm a Fortune 500 company looking for a blockchain solution, who am I going to pick? I have one team, VeChain, who is being directly championed by PwC, a long-time partner and trusted force in the business world, or the shiny, technical strong blockchain solution that I have no previous connections to? IT implementations are costly and projects failures are devastating. Business will go with what they know to be safe.
VeChain is already grabbing billion dollar partnerships left and right, and will continue doing so in the future. These companies are all migrating onto the VeChain blockchain, and will have to go through the growing pains of expanding their IT capabilities to support VeChain. They will need to create processes to manage their VET/Thor Power tokens. They will need to train their people and hire outside consultants to assist. It will be incredibly challenging.
Now tell me, imagine these same companies are looking to implement a blockchain solution to solve another business problem. Do you really think companies are going to want to go through this same process with another ecosystem when they’ve adapted their workforce to support VeChain? VET/THOR will have to adapted into the company's bottom line, their IT, their finances, their taxes, etc. Many clients will invest in the ecosystem by buying VET tokens to generate their own Thor Power. The path of least resistance (cost and time) is going to push these enterprises to continue using VeChain, and for others to develop dApps on it as well. This is going to compound over time as the initial trust in VeChain will grow as other trusted enterprise businesses (not small bootstrapping ICO teams) build dApps on the platform.
Enterprise Blockchain as a Service (BaaS)
VeChain is so exciting to me right now because with these strong fundamentals, it is hardly a cryptocurrency, but rather one of the first Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) ecosystems with overwhelming evidence of enterprise adoption. This is different than something like the Ethereum Alliance, where many enterprise players are interested in the development of the technology, but you don't see Samsung or Microsoft with explicit plans to buy Ethereum and develop dApps on it. Businesses in every industry with productiwill enter VeChain’s ecosystem through their logistics/counterfeit protection arm, then stay within it for the entire offering of services provided. Once VeChain gets off the ground it will be nearly immune to the crypto crash we all fear, as it will be an enterprise eco-system being used by billion dollar players in the industry, not fueled by rampant speculation.
For all these reasons, I’ve essentially gone all-in on VeChain for the time being (The other half of my portfolio is XRB). I have never seen such strong fundamentals in another blockchain project with real world evidence that real business is occurring.
I invite you to look deeper as well if you haven’t already. VeChain is going to be huge.
by NTSpike, /r/Vechain.
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