VeChain Thor mainnet reaches 10 million blocks milestone with no downtime

Published at: Sept. 2, 2021

Supply chain platform VeChain has reached a milestone in terms of uptime and processed blocks on the VeChain Thor mainnet.

The VeChain Foundation posted the achievement on its Twitter feed on Wednesday, adding that it was “a major milestone that is testament to our public blockchain’s scalability, security, and rock-solid stability.”

The VeChain Thor network has now surpassed 10 million blocks and was currently processing block number 10,004,141 at the time of writing. Comparatively, Bitcoin has recorded a 99.98% uptime since January 2009 according to this tracker.

The foundation noted it has seen consistent enterprise usage from commerce giant Walmart and governmental adoption from both San Marino and China, where the project has close ties. VeChain partnered with a Walmart subsidiary in China to track food products in June 2020.

According to the foundation, there are some major infrastructural updates in the pipeline, such as proof-of-authority 2.0 alongside “more partnerships and use cases, community dApps, growth and more.”

VeChain uses a proof-of-authority (PoA) consensus mechanism, which enables the network to process high-speed transactions based on identity and reputation as a stake, using just 101 authority nodes.

The enterprise supply chain management platform plans to upgrade to a next-generation consensus mechanism called PoA 2.0-SURFACE, which it describes as a “secure, use-case adaptive, and relatively fork-free approach of chain extension.”

The upgrade will enable higher on-chain throughput and reduced forking probability with the “highest level of data security unfound in any other blockchain platforms,” according to VeChain.

VeChain launched its public testnet with the first two components of the consensus upgrade in late July, however, did not specify a launch date for the final mainnet.

More recently, VeChain announced a partnership with global commercial real estate services firm Jones Lang LaSalle Incorporated. The firm is working with VeChain to explore sustainable blockchain adoption with a view to expanding its operations in China.

On Aug. 26, Cointelegraph reported that VeChain had unveiled a new initiative that will assist businesses in tracking and reporting their carbon footprint data. It touted the new Digital Carbon Footprint software-as-a-service as a “rapidly deployable tool, enabling enterprises of all sizes to re-engineer their carbon footprint data management practices.”

VeChain’s native token, VET, has been making solid gains on the back of recent project developments. VET has gained 14% over the past 24 hours to trade at $0.138, according to CoinGecko, and is now up 60% over the past month — but still 51% down from its April 19 all-time high of $0.28.