VeThor

VeChainThor began at midnight UTC on 30 June 2018 with a deliberate split. VET represented the scarce network asset; VeThor, recorded in the client as “energy,” began at zero and accumulated separately. A transfer or contract call spent VTHO instead of shaving value from the VET balance that supported the wider economy.

The split also made invisible payment possible. VeChainThor’s fee-delegation machinery lets a contract sponsor a user. A warehouse worker or customer can trigger an on-chain action while the application pays the fuel bill. That design made VTHO operationally important without requiring every end user to own it.

The token was not launched through its own sale. It is a built-in VIP-180 asset at a readable system address ending in the ASCII word “Energy.” Its familiar transfer and allowance methods make it wallet-compatible, but its creation and destruction happen inside chain rules.

The original formula treated every VET alike. Each unit produced 0.000432 VTHO per day, whether held by an authority node, an application treasury or an idle wallet. As all VET already existed, this made VTHO issuance steady and easy to forecast. It also detached new fuel from the work of producing blocks.

Fees supplied the counterweight. The early system burned 70% of a transaction fee and paid 30% to the producer. Supply could grow through universal VET generation and shrink through use. The model separated enterprise gas budgets from VET’s market price, but network activity and passive issuance did not have to move together.

Galactica reached mainnet block 22,084,200 on 1 July 2025. Its EIP-1559-style market burns the dynamic base fee and sends any priority fee to the proposer. That was the first half of the monetary rewrite: the amount destroyed now responds to block demand, while users can tip for priority.

Hayabusa began at block 23,414,400 on 2 December. At that boundary the client stopped balance-based growth. The protocol then held a seven-day, 60,480-block transition in which neither the old mechanism nor the new staking rewards generated VTHO. The post-transition boundary arrived on 9 December, after which accepted blocks under DPoS became the source of new supply.

The replacement formula looks at actively staked VET and applies diminishing returns. A validator with delegators keeps 30% of its block reward and sends 70% to their pool; one without delegators keeps the block reward. Passive VET earns nothing. The change connected inflation to security, but it also concentrated new VTHO among those who meet staking, delegation and validator-performance conditions.

VTHO has no fixed cap. At mainnet block 25,804,268, live native counters showed about 107.57 billion VTHO in gross cumulative issuance and 4.07 billion burned. The client does not subtract burned units from its totalSupply counter, so calling that number circulating supply would be wrong. Later blocks change both counters.

There is no normal deployer account with a public mint or freeze method on the Energy interface. That does not make the economics immutable. Thor client releases install built-in code at hard-fork heights, protocol parameters shape reward calculations, approved proposals need implementation, and validators must run the adopted software.

The split ends with an asymmetry. VTHO holders pay for the network but receive no VTHO-based vote. Governance weight sits with validators and eligible VET-backed StarGate positions. The Foundation’s MiCAR paper also rejects issuer redemption, dividends, profits and proprietary claims. The fuel works when the chain accepts it; it is not a claim on the organization that maintains the chain.