In the fast-growing world, a significant increase in the number of vehicles has opened an opportunity to transform vehicles from a mechanical device to an intelligent system. The vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is designed to exchange messages with nearby devices. However, it is tough to transmit information from a sender to a receiver in a public environment due to malicious activities (by an adversary), wireless connection, mobility, and high-cost requirement. In this paper, we propose a state-of-the-art protocol, names as 'VehicleChain' for smart transportation to ensure secure and cost-effective vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications. The VehicleChain combines the robustness of a blockchain with elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) to improve the system security level without increasing the computational cost. The VehicleChain is protected against different attacks, i.e., insider, server spoofing, modification, man-in-the-middle, plaintext, replay, and impersonation. Further, the proposed scheme comparatively achieves better results for different performance measures. © 2019 IEEE.