Blockchains I Velas blockchain

Ethereum and the other blockchains are struggling with scalability issues. This causes high transaction costs. Due to the problems with the blockchains, many projects have gone to the drawing board to set up the blockchain even better than the existing blockchains. One project that has many ambitions and is very user-friendly is Velas (VLX).

Next week I will provide a quick tutorial how to compile a smart contract on the Velas blockchain! 

What is Velas?

The team at Velas owes its inspiration to Web 3.0 and blockchain. As a result, the team has come up with a project with a decentralized ecosystem where transparency, community and the delivery of good products and services are paramount.

The team wants to deliver the best possible product. Velas has designed one of the most secure and fast platforms. This makes it theoretically possible to build many Dapps.

One of the major problems of the current blockchain are not that sscalable. It is not possible to run many transactions and applications on it. Velas tries to be better at this, enticing many developers to use Velas. They can then sell themselves as an alternative to the current blockchains.

In terms of scalability, Ethereum is the best example to illustrate. Because there are many transactions on the blockchain, the blockchain cannot handle these large volumes. Ethereum is limited by its own popularity. That in itself is not a big deal. The more popular crypto and blockchain becomes, the better, but the industry has to keep up. Velas has a solution similar to Solana's, but with some additional features and innovations.

Ethereum Virtual Machine

Velas is currently one of the fastest or the fastest blockchain. Velas can currently process about 75,000 transactions per second at very low transaction costs. Velas is able to achieve this by using Solana's solution and leveraging some of the features of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) (simply the Ethereum blockchain). The big advantage of the EVM is that it has a large customer base and many Dapps are built on it. Through the EVM bridge, these apps can also run on Velas. See more about what exactly the bridge is here. In short, it allows you to ''link'' two blockchains together to utilize the benefits of both blockchains.

So Velas wants to implement and combine the good elements of the EVM. This ensures that developers can easily work with Velas and build Dapps. Because of Velas' low cost and fast blockchain, this could be an interesting project for many developers.

For the technical people among us:

To run the bridge, provide a path to keypair of fee payer account along with native RPC endpoint, address:port to bind to, and EVM chain id.

evm-bridge keypair.json https://api.testnet.velas.com 127.0.0.1:8545 111

Velas Vault
Most people are used to creating and storing passwords for different accounts in different places. Blockchain and crypto have added a seed phrase to the wallet where the crypto is stored. The seed phrase is very important as this is your backup code to access your wallet. Your wallet data can be restored through this seed phrase. If you lose your seed phrase then you also lose your crypto stored in your wallet. Not your keys, not your crypto.

It is therefore of great importance that the keys are stored properly and do not fall into the wrong hands. Especially regarding the private key. That is the key that gives access to your crypto (a sort of key to your mailbox).

Velas has a Velas Vault, a safe where you can keep your crypto safe. Velas offers the possibility of delegating responsibility of security to existing market participants such as Google or Apple. Passwords and keys will be stored on servers, with the ability to verify and transfer data based on proof of ownership. This system is called the Velas Vault. In the Velas Vault, some of the information is useless without consensus, which brings all the information together.

To ensure the reliability of the Velas Vault, the security of the network is very important. Since the Velas blockchain is based on Proof-of-Stake consensus, a pool of validators is responsible for maintaining the security of the network.

VLX crypto

VLX is used for transactions, payments, fees and to support the Proof of Stake system. Crypto staking allows validators and delegators to keep the network and transactions on the network safe for which they receive a reward. However, these users must first deposit an amount of money (stake).

If you want to become a validator or delegator yourself, you will need to have a minimum number of VLX. To become a validator you will need about 1 million VLX. But you can, if you have less than 1 million VLX, join a staking pool (delegator). Here you ''stake'' your crypto in a pool with others. The transaction costs are then shared among all participants in that pool. Every 6 hours, 19 validators are chosen to verify the transaction on the blockchain. 40% of the reward/transaction costs go to the validators and 60% is distributed among the delegators who have staked their VLX in a pool.

Critical remarks
The vision and technology looks very promising. But no blockchain project is perfect, including Velas. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Velas has started to take the next step and once that happens, mistakes and problems come with it.

The competition for Velas is very high. In addition to innovating the blockchain, you also need to attract investors to your project. Velas is very unknown in the blockchain world. Ethereum, on the other hand, is the most well-known and trusted besides bitcoin. Many new projects are therefore launched on the Ethereum blockchain.

The next generation blockchains is already coming. Some well-known projects are considered to replace the current blockchains like Cardano, Cosmos and Polkadot. Velas is not in the top 10 of these ''new'' blockchains. But Velas does claim to have improved the technology of Ethereum and Solana. At this point, it is far too early to judge whether that is the case.

One danger is that Velas will not continue to innovate. If they believe that they have improved the blockchains of Ethereum and Solana. This is a real risk that many new blockchains encounter.