Top Velas dapps overview

Velas

What is Velas?

Velas, or Virtual Expanding Learning Autonomous System, is an EVM/eBPF hybrid blockchain, supporting dApps and smart contracts on its mainnet with high scalability said to be up to 75,000 transactions per second. While EVM stands for Ethereum Virtual Machine, eBPF, or Extended Berkeley Packet Filter is the innovation the project introduces. Moreover, eBPF is a kernel technology that was first made available in Linux 4, which allows programs to run without having to change the Kernel source code or add additional modules.

The blockchain has a mainnet launched in February 2020 powered by the EVM/eBPF Hybrid Chain mechanism and utilizes its VLX token as the meaning of value within the network. Velas also introduces products such as Velas Account and BitOrbit – a platform targeted at influencers wishing to generate more revenue from their content.

How does Velas work?

When creating Velas, the team behind it tried to address the blockchain trilemma while forming the basis for Web3 by utilizing the maximum achievement of the theoretical performance limit, without compromising on safety and decentralization. For this reason, the Velas team chose Solana as a foundation for their blockchain and included various innovations to ensure a more secure and user-friendly interaction with the platform.

The project uses its own password authentication system, allowing users to access a variety of services without a password through their Velas Account. Moreover, acknowledging Ethereum’s effect on DeFi, the team has implemented the Ethereum Virtual Machine to allow developers to easily port their dApps to Velas and take advantage of its low transaction cost and high TPS capabilities. At the same time, the Velas team also acknowledges the innovations implemented by Solana, namely its almost instant confirmation for e-payments. The Velas team claims that Solana is the best one-shard chain with vast optimizations within it allowing the network to reach a speed of 60,000 TPS through GPU utilization, transaction processing parallelization, and other methods. Due to these and other factors, Velas is built on top of the Solana blockchain technology.

Velas provides its users with a technology aimed to accelerate and make transactions cheaper from other systems by leveraging the speed and security of Velas, this product is called Velas Vaults. These vaults can utilize different authentication solutions such as Google, Apple Authentication, or the project’s native Velas Account to make interactions with Velas as user-friendly as possible.

Blockchain services such as transactions on Velas are performed through back-end processes, as the team states users shouldn’t need to pay for it on-chain just like they don’t pay when centralized apps query data. At the same time, projects launched on Velas maintain the possibility to charge fees on their project’s token automatically, in a way that doesn’t interfere with users’ experience. 

Velas Account authentication as well as interactions with cryptocurrencies are facilitated to the convenience level of centralized technology but are said to not be sacrificing user privacy and security by utilizing various security features. Velas Account uses biometric authentication from users’ devices to confirm login requests and transactions. Seed phrases are only available for advanced users, while beginners can back their Accounts by social media logins without the need to manage their private keys directly. The product allows a full overview of all connected apps and active login sessions across all of the user’s devices and provides the ability to terminate sessions and revoke permissions seamlessly, at any time. Velas accounts can be set up to execute app-specific transactions in the background after the user whitelists a dApp. Sending ERC-20 tokens to dApps doesn’t require multiple transactions, and the transaction confirmation screen lacks technical details, said to be so in order to provide only necessary and verifiable information to users.

In terms of achieving consensus, the Velas team did thorough research on all possible consensus mechanisms and came to the conclusions that the computation-intensive-based consensus protocols suffer from high energy consumption, low transaction throughput, and low scalability, while capability-based protocols tend to be biased towards the rich users, making such solutions more prone to malicious attacks. At the same time, the team states that voting-based protocols have a high number of data transfers, leading to high energy consumption. For these reasons, the Velas team chose to implement a DPoS consensus mechanism, seen as much more scalable than PoW and the traditional PoS, while also being democratic and encouraging decentralized network governance due to the delegates’ role in the blockchain. Furthermore, DPoS is described as having strong protection from double-spend attacks, while maintaining the entrance threshold for delegators “extremely low”.

How to use Velas?

The Velas wallet app comes with both desktop and mobile versions available for download through the project’s official resources webpage. The Velas desktop wallet protects users against online attacks, including Phishing, IP spoofing, and XSS (cross-site scripting). The app comes with support on every popular OS – macOS, Windows, and Linux. At the same time, the Velas mobile wallet allows users to initialize it with a single mnemonic phrase and start transferring or storing digital assets. Finally, the Velas wallet also comes with a web version allowing users to log in from any device, but at the cost of lower protection levels on their assets, due to higher chances of devices being infected with malicious software.

Users wishing to run a validator node on Velas can do so with any amount of VLX tokens but the node can only receive rewards if it has a stake of at least 1 million VLX tokens. When delegating their stake, users have two choices: they can either do so through the Velas platform and choose the node they want to delegate their stake to, or they can stake VLX through various exchanges with a minimum amount of 1 VLX but in these cases, they cannot choose the node to be delegated on.

Velas validators can set a commission fee in the protocol – a percentage acting as a proportional cut that validators receive from the delegated stake in exchange of operating the node infrastructure on behalf of their delegates. Although there is no limitation on the duration of stake, the Velas team notes that on most exchanges there are usually three options – 30-, 60-, or 90-day periods. 

Velas fees vary and depend on the transferred amount – larger amounts mean larger fees. Velas collects fees from transfers between wallets, apps, and exchanges. The network doesn’t support transferring multiple assets to multiple wallet addresses in one transaction. Velas fees can be seen in each transaction on the Velas explorer. 

To attract the launch of more projects in its ecosystem, Velas advertises itself as the fastest EVM/eBPF hybrid chain, including services such as Distributed Data Storage, and Decentralized Cloud Computing, which can be used to optimize Velas’ performance.

Velas staking

When staking VLX tokens users are subject to a so-called warm-up period, a timeframe, currently set to two days, until which users’ stake doesn’t start earning any rewards. When unstaking, there is also a two-day period called cool-down during which user funds are not yet liquid.

Users wishing to stake VLX tokens need to create a stake account, which is a different type of account from a wallet address and can only be used to send and receive VLX tokens between different wallets. This can be done by navigating to the Staking page on the Velas platform, where a list of already created stake accounts (if the user already has such) is present along with a list of available validators. Once a validator has been chosen, users only need to click on the ‘Stake’ button, enter the amount they wish to stake, click on ‘Confirm’, and create their stake account. 

Validators' commission rates are adjustable on Velas, making validators compete for their delegates by lowering their rates. When receiving rewards for their stake, users don’t need to do anything to collect them, since they get auto compounded to their active stake, meaning that to claim rewards users need to first submit a request to withdraw, input the desired amount and wait for the cooldown period to pass.  

The VLX token

VLX doesn’t have a maximum supply, its current total supply is 2,229,737,314 tokens with an inflation rate of 8% reduced by 15% annually until it reaches 1.5% as long-term inflation. As many of the other Velas innovations, the VLX tokenomics were inherited from Solana, thus their official documentation regarding the token only consists of links to Solana official documents, and only includes basic token metrics.

Is Velas safe?

The Velas team and the company itself were founded by Alex Alexandrov who is also the founder and CEO of CoinPayments, Alexandrov also consults various law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, Europol, and numerous other government agencies focused on technology, cybersecurity, and blockchain in general. Velas also has another founder - Farkhad Shagulyamov who is the current CEO of the platform. His experience prior to founding Velas includes being a chairman at Shanghai Yitong Ltd., as well as Partner and Head of Business Development at Blockchain Suisse AG and Alpina Capital AG.

The company was launched as a start-up headquartered in Switzerland, where it remains situated to this day, and began operations in 2019. So far, there are no Velas audits available publicly.

Ecosystem & Partners 

Velas is currently running a $100 million grant program aimed at bringing more projects and developers to its ecosystem. So far, the Velas ecosystem consists of numerous platforms including popular infrastructure solutions CoinTool, Avarta, Bitquery, Dysnix, and others. Among the DeFi projects taking part in the Velas ecosystem are TrustSwap, KyberSwap, Ferrum Network, and many others. DEXes on Velas include Waoyu Swap, Asrto Swap, and Autofarm. All popular wallets such as MetaMask, Trust Wallet, and BitKeep are integrating Velas, as well as content platforms Army and Bitorbit.

Velas’ NFT scene includes marketplaces such as MetaOcean, PlayNFT, Sparkies, Weway, and many others, as well as NFT collections such as Velas Punks, Velas Dogs, Buddy, Velapes Academy, Velas Ape Yacht Club, and numerous others. The GameFi industry is represented on Velas by Velhalla, Oxuniverse, and others.

Among the many projects partnering with Velas are Ferrari, Brdigewood, Spacechain, Cruptosat, Tokengate, Travala,com, Fireblocks, Seba bank, Sierra block games, Utorg, Blochain Suisse, Path, Crypto valley, and others.

What's next?

There is no Velas roadmap published at the time of writing this article. The team behind the project remains focused on growing its ecosystem, and further improving the user experience. 

Links

https://docs.velas.com/ 

Author:

Frank Stewskid

Last updated: Aug 22, 2023