At four in the morning, I rubbed my sore eyes. The server chassis behind me hummed, and the block explorer of the Vanar testnet was refreshing on the screen. This was the third night in a row I had stayed up testing this chain. The reason was quite simple: last week, my AI agent bot deployed on Arbitrum burned through the little interest in my wallet due to a sudden spike in gas fees. At that moment, I was thinking: if the future of Web3 is this kind of aristocratic game, then AI will never have a chance to enter on a large scale.
Carrying this anger and the mentality of looking for alternatives, I stumbled upon Vanar (@vanar). To be honest, I initially had no expectations for it; the narrative was too grand (AI, PayFi, RWA), and the performance seemed lifeless. However, after an in-depth test, I found the logic hidden behind this monkey is far more exciting than the candlestick charts.
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▶ 01. Dimensionality reduction of business models: it's not selling tokens, it's selling cloud services
I have studied so many L1s, where everyone is competing on TPS and parallel EVMs. But I found that what Vanar is pondering is quite different. It aims to solve an extremely hidden yet fatal pain point: the unpredictability of costs when AI agents enter the scene.
Most chain fee models resemble bidding at a highway toll booth, where prices rise during congestion. This is bearable for retail investors, but for future high-frequency AI agents, unpredictable costs mean they cannot establish a business model.
I found that Vanar's most hardcore design is its layered fixed fees. I wrote a script to simulate 500 AI agents interacting simultaneously and was surprised to find that its gas fee curve was as stable as a straightened ECG. No matter how high the concurrency is, the cost of each transaction is firmly pinned in the range of $0.0005.
My judgment is: Vanar never intended to make money from gas fees; it aims to be the AWS of Web3. It treats the chain as a subscription-based infrastructure to sell, which is the mindset of a businessman.
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▶ 02. Technical aspect of the hippocampus: what makes the Neutron architecture strong?
Now every project claims to be AI native, but after delving deep into Vanar's Neutron semantic storage architecture, I was deeply impressed.
Current assets on the chain are often dead data. Ethereum knows you have this dragon-slaying sword, but it doesn't know under what logic its attack power doubles; all this soul is in centralized servers off-chain. Vanar attempts to structure this metadata and embed it into the chain's underlying layer.
I think this is the true hippocampus of AI: enabling smart contracts to understand context.
What surprised me even more was its choice of verification nodes. When I saw Google Cloud's name, I didn't feel like others did that this was a centralized surrender; instead, I breathed a sigh of relief. Decentralization is a belief, but not having server downtime is a livelihood. For big companies like Nike and Ubisoft, what they need is an SLA (Service Level Agreement) supported by professional operations, not some mining machine in a basement.
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▶ 03. Business implementation: is it really handling trillion-level real money?
I am someone who doesn't listen to stories, only focusing on actions.
What I value is its partnership with Worldpay. Worldpay processes $23 trillion in transactions annually. If Vanar can really connect certain aspects of stablecoin settlement to such a large payment network, it won't capture the false traffic of Web3, but real merchants and real transactions.
Moreover, it made personnel changes to strengthen its payment infrastructure by the end of 2025. You can roughly guess where it plans to invest money by seeing whom it hires and where they are placed. This trend towards PayFi and agentic payments has indeed hit the sweet spot in this compliance-heavy year of 2026.
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▶ 04. Risk points: thin market and ghost town effect
Although I have said a lot of good things above, upon reflection, the risk points are equally painful.
First, the market is too thin. The market cap is only over $10 million (with price fluctuations), and the volume is a few million over 24 hours. With this scale, once liquidity cools down, it can really kick people out. It currently resembles an event-driven asset rather than an institutional allocation.
Second, ecological ghost town. When I interacted on-chain, besides my own contracts going crazy on the screen, there were very few other transaction records. It's like a magnificent high-tech zone where the roads are wider than airport runways, but currently, very few companies have set up shop.
I am puzzled that current token activities are still mainly dominated by exchanges, while real users are lingering outside the door. If this desensitization strategy doesn't work, then this infrastructure will ultimately just be a gorgeous display.
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▶ My summary insights: it's not a Ferrari, but a heavy-duty truck.
I have always believed that Vanar Chain does not belong to the kind of narrative Ferrari that can make your adrenaline soar and achieve hundredfold returns overnight. It resembles a sturdy and durable heavy truck.
It's not sexy, and is even a bit boring, but it is designed to transport tons of AI data and financial assets.
My suggestion is:
If you want to bet on the big direction of on-chain payments and compliance automation, Vanar is a player worth keeping an eye on in your watchlist. But I wouldn't recommend going all in and then waiting for miracles, as it's not uncommon for it to give you -10% in a day.
I will continue to keep an eye on two things:
Can the collaboration with Worldpay actually produce real merchant settlement data?
Does its Neutron storage layer really have third-party developers running complex AI businesses on it?
Data doesn't lie. Anyone who has been in this industry for a long time knows that the ones who survive are often not the best storytellers, but those who can do the dirty and hard work.
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Anna | A rational Web3 explorer
This is just my personal experience and understanding, and it does not constitute investment advice. DYOR, and be responsible for your own decisions.
