BYD, China’s well-known car manufacturer and new energy solution provider, released a Carbon Credit App which the company co-developed with DNV GL, an international risk management company, and VeChain, a Shanghai-based blockchain application company.
BYD has been the world’s top manufacturer of plug-in electric cars for the last three years. The new app was created to encourage travel by new energy vehicles to reduce carbon emission with smart collection and management of data. It was presented during BYD’s Worldwide Developer Conference on September 5th and is part of the carbon banking solution devised by the three partners.
VeChain, the key tech contributor to the app, enables BYD to calculate a user’s carbon emission level with a smart contract built on VeChainThor, VeChain’s public blockchain. The technology helps gather data on mileage, fuel consumption, and electricity consumption, and then issues carbon credits that can be exchanged for goods and services. A user can log into the app’s calculation system from an application programming interface (API) installed in BYD’s new energy cars by scanning a QR code.
According to an official release TechNode acquired from VeChain, the company believes that “this will be the first enterprise-level application moving the data of millions of cars, buses, trains, and other vehicles onto a public blockchain platform.” The confident statement implies the company’s vision to expand the footprint of their business to a wide range of sectors in the transportation industry.
This is not the company’s first cooperation with leading Chinese enterprises. On September 2, VeChain entered a partnership with the People’s Insurance Company (Group) of China (PICC), the country’s leading state-backed insurance solution provider. The partnership, according to PICC, will provide a “robust digital trust platform” for enhanced data management and processing.
The cooperation with BYD will allow VeChain to approach vehicle maintenance shops and other after-sale sectors who will function as data providers for lifecycle data management of the vehicles.
Interestingly, the debut of the app is just 3 days after VeChain’s announcement of its partnership with PICC. Though VeChain said today that the data VeChainThor collected for BYD’s new energy solutions will cast light on improving efficiency and reliability of insurance, there is no sign of a three-party partnership between VeChain, BYD, and PICC.
VeChain has been keeping its profile low in China’s blockchain field, but the company’s achievements have raised interest. According to a report on the ranking of global companies’ blockchain patent qualified so far, Alibaba topped the list with 90 patents. Tencent ranked 8th (40) and VeChain ranked 10th (38).