On Monday and Tuesday I had the huge privilege of attending two VEE meetups, which I am still so excited about! So here’s a blog post about it.

VEE stands for “Virtual Economy Era” and interestingly, their slogan is “Return of The King”. The King is a reference to Sunny King, inventor of Proof of Stake, who is part of the VEE team.

Disclaimer: This post is not meant to be an “expert” sort of post–you’ll probably see lots of potentially “silly” questions and thoughts. Rather, it is meant to be a documentation of my own journey of learning with VEE ^^

As a Public Relations Practitioner, even as I can represent, strategize and sell well, I do recognise that there are gaps in my tech knowledge. I’m constantly learning, and please do be patient with me! 🙂

Introduction: What Is VEE?

VEE is an open-source blockchain platform that allows developers to build applications through public APIs. The general database feature allows developer to simplify data module design and focus on business logic.

The secured network supports both in-chain and cross-chain transactions for the ecosystem of applications, hence allowing the VEE platform to be scalable and of huge value to application developers and end-users.

VEE Educational Seminar at Suntec City on Monday

VEE held its first educational seminar in Singapore at Suntec City on the 29th of Jan, 2018.

The first part of the seminar was about the historical development of bitcoin and the evolution of the internet of money.

The second part of the seminar was spearheaded by the gentleman on the left is Rob Zhang, the CEO of VEE Technologies. He gave a really informative about the VEE platform and its use cases.

Aside from that he’s also a really patient gentleman with a great sense of humour–you can literally ask him any questions about blockchain or VEE and he will answer in a kind and detailed manner.

Greatly appreciated. Here are more pictures!

VEE Educational Seminar at Temasek Polytechnic on Tuesday

VEE held “The Blockchain Technology Seminar” at Temasek Polytechnic on 30^th January 2018.

There were leaders from different fields attending the talk, including Oman’s ambassador to Singapore, Singapore’s ambassador to Oman and Dr Lee, Director for the School of Applied Science at Temasek Polytechnic.

Really impressive turnout, I must say! I really salute Temasek Polytechnic for even hosting such an amazing event for their students and business people. That’s contributing back to society and the economy in a very real way in lifelong education.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the QnA sessions–there were questions ranging from “How do you keep your cryptocurrencies safe” to “The differences between private Vs public blockchains” to strange imagined contingencies of people hacking into the VEE system.

I was surprised however, to find out that there were no direct questions on investment in VEE haha, such as “How do I buy the coin?” Haha.  Quite a nice and intellectual meetup!

Personal Opinion: The Difference Between VEE and Other Protocols

In my opinion, VEE has huge potential because of its emphasis and positioning on database technology. This is the main difference (in my opinion and limited technical knowledge) between VEE and other protocols, such as ethereum.

Let’s use analogies to explain the difference:

• Imagine Ethereum as a mobile phone. Anyone can programme “mobile phone apps” on ethereum-the-mobile-phone in a decentralised manner, as long as they know the programming language; and
• Imagine VEE a mobile phone with an in-built search function. Anyone can programme “mobile phone apps” on Vee-the-iphone in a decentralised manner. Different from the Ethereum-mobile-phone, user can now also search across “apps” on the VEE mobile phone.
• A potential useful implication is the following– Assume that you forgot which app you saved a particular document in. You can simply search the name of the document on the search tool, and almost immediately the protocol allows you to find the app.

In other words, the “query”/ search function is key to VEE’s database perspective to blockchain. This is also probably what VEE meant by their mission to provide “general purpose database features to represent data and information in descriptive and integrative manner, so that application developers can focus on business logic.

Another implication and benefit is also that the VEE protocol is scalable– both inter and cross chain– because of the fundamental focus on database technology.

The best part is that VEE also provides free public API for application developers–who can be absolutely anyone.

No permission is needed as it is decentralised, and only a hosting cost will be charged to the application developer. The VEE platform will focus on taking care of its distributed database maintenance, technology and upgrade, whereas the application developer can finally focus wholly on business logic and best serving the end-user. Overall costs to application development from the perspective of the company will be reduced therefore.

So you see, this VEE ecosystem is designed right from the start to benefit businesses and users as part of a bigger integrative picture.

Random Curious Notes

If you were to tell a story about VEE in an engaging manner to the public, how would you do it?

My PR mind really wonders about that. I felt that the VEE talks on both days were more targeted to developers and tech enthusiasts, even though both talks commenced with a pretty untechnical historical context to the development of bitcoin and blockchain.

With reference to public communications, I’m talking about the standard of engagement set by for instance, Ivan On Tech in the following video:

As you can see from the video, Ivan engages the audience who may or may not have technical knowledge through skillful storytelling. He’s a software developer by profession, and “just like a Swede” he communicates in an artful manner that resonates with the audience. His examples are easy to remember, humane and relatable.

So I started wondering…How can you communicate the features and essence of a “database-perspective on blockchain” as opposed to “just a protocol that allows you to build apps on it” in a manner that is easy to understand, without losing the essence of the technical parts?

Will the mention of the usefulness of the SEARCH function suffice to differentiate VEE from other alternative protocols that are already out there, both in the branding and/or technical sense?

It’s really food for thought and I’ll love to hear from you–you can PM me anytime to discuss!

Conclusion: So What’s Next?

Well, the VEE platform will be launched officially in May 2018, so I’m really looking forward to it!

An interesting thing to note is that also that we still don’t know who Sunny King is, haha! He definitely did not introduce himself at both meetup sessions, so perhaps he wasn’t even there–who knows?

Maybe the mystery is part of their PR campaign, just like how Nakamoto Satoshi chose to keep his identity secret. 😛

Anyway we’ll probably get more information then, so let’s say tuned!

Photographs Credit: Raymond Ng