Mastervolt and Victron Publish Joint VE.Smart Marine Spec — Common Pack-to-Charger Protocol Ends Vendor Lock-In
In a notable departure from a decade of competing CAN-bus dialects, Mastervolt and Victron have co-published VE.Smart Marine — an open protocol for pack-to-charger, pack-to-MPPT, and pack-to-inverter communication. Pylontech, BSLBatt, and OceanVolt have all signalled support, which would cover roughly 70% of European installed marine LFP packs.
Mastervolt and Victron Energy jointly published VE.Smart Marine 1.0 today — an open CAN-bus protocol specification for pack-to-charger, pack-to-MPPT, pack-to-inverter, and pack-to-motor-controller communication on marine 48 V and 96 V DC systems. The release is notable both for the technical content and for the politics: the two companies have operated competing proprietary dialects (VE.Can on the Victron side and MasterBus on the Mastervolt side) for more than a decade, and unifying around an open spec is a meaningful break from the vendor-lock-in pattern that has frustrated installers and DIY refit projects alike.
Technically, VE.Smart Marine 1.0 standardises six message classes: state-of-charge and cell voltage telemetry, charge-current request, discharge-current limit, contactor open/close commands, BMS fault reporting, and pack-temperature reporting. The message set is deliberately smaller than either company's existing dialect — the design goal was the intersection of useful behaviour, not the union, so first-generation implementations should be tractable for any modern marine BMS. Authentication is optional but supported via a pre-shared key model, enabling future security extensions without breaking the base protocol.
Three additional manufacturers have signalled commitment to ship VE.Smart Marine support in their next firmware cycle: Pylontech (the largest European-sold LFP pack brand by volume), BSLBatt (a major prismatic pack supplier to the marine retrofit market), and OceanVolt (motor controllers and ServoProp saildrives). If those three follow through, the protocol would cover roughly 70% of the installed marine LFP base in Europe by end-2027 — a critical mass that effectively forces the remaining brands to either adopt or accept exclusion from multi-vendor installations.
For installers, the practical effect is that mixing brands within a single boat — common in practice, because the cheapest charger and the best pack rarely come from the same vendor — stops requiring CAN-bus gateway boxes and brittle translation firmware. For owners, it means that replacing a charger or a BMS at end-of-life no longer locks in the rest of the system's brand choice. For the wider industry, it is the first non-trivial step toward the open-protocol world that the marine sector has been promising for a decade. The spec is published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence; reference implementations in C and Rust are committed to be released by Q3 2026.