At that moment, I was staring at the constantly changing transaction hash on the screen. The coffee in my hand had long gone cold, but I couldn't care less about drinking it. In order to find a stable home for this AI agent that requires dozens of micro-interactions every minute, I have been wandering in the testnets of major public chains this week. If it were two years ago, I would have definitely mindlessly chosen Solana or Polygon, as the TPS data speaks for itself. However, when you actually run high-frequency business logic, reality will give you a harsh slap. Solana is indeed fast, but the occasional network congestion and potential downtime risks are like time bombs for AI services that require 24/7 online availability; meanwhile, Polygon's current state is too bloated, with various DeFi schemes and junk tokens crowding the on-chain space, causing Gas fees to fluctuate wildly like a roller coaster. It was in this despair of repeatedly being humiliated by Gas fees that I deployed the code to Vanar.
To be honest, I initially had a bias against Vanar. In this era where various ZK-Rollup concepts are flying around, Vanar's technical documentation seems so plain that it’s almost rudimentary. It hasn’t invented any new consensus mechanism that sounds impressive; instead, it tightly focuses on EVM compatibility and zero friction. But when I started deploying contracts, this simplicity turned into amazement. I moved a set of NFT dynamic metadata logic that I had previously struggled with on Arbitrum to Vanar without changing a single character. At the moment I pressed the deploy button, I was even prepared for an error, as the compatibility of new public chains is usually Schrödinger's cat. The result was an instant pass. This smooth experience made me momentarily feel as if I were operating a centralized cloud database rather than a distributed blockchain.
True AI on-chain interaction is not about stuffing large models into blocks, but rather about sending massive amounts of high-frequency, trivial data fingerprints on-chain. For example, an AI agent running on a decentralized network might make hundreds of decisions every minute. If each decision requires several dollars in fees like on the Ethereum mainnet, or if there’s a need to worry about centralization risks of sorters like on Layer 2, this business model would go bankrupt on the first day. I ran a simulated high-frequency trading bot logic on Vanar, specifically to test the stability of Gas fees under extreme concurrency. The results showed that even when I pushed the concurrency to several thousand, the fluctuation curve of Gas fees remained as smooth as if running on a local server. This extreme cost control and determinism made me feel it was not a typical crypto project, but rather an on-chain version of Google Cloud. It was only then that I realized their long-proclaimed deep partnership with Google Cloud may not be as simple as just issuing a PR; this underlying stability likely directly reuses the mature architecture of Web2 giants.
But this doesn’t mean it’s flawless. When I tried to call the Creator Pad's interface via code to batch generate assets, I encountered a very strange bug. When the uploaded metadata file exceeds a certain size, the hash value returned by the node occasionally does not match the locally computed one. This almost made me think there was a problem with the chain's data consistency, and I broke into a cold sweat. After troubleshooting for half a day, I found that their API gateway had a timeout setting that was too short when handling large data packets, leading to truncation. Such a low-level error appearing on a public chain that claims to be enterprise-level is somewhat unacceptable; although it doesn't involve asset security, it is highly detrimental to morale. This also indirectly reflects that, despite a solid foundation, the upper-level developer toolchain still requires a lot of polishing. Compared to Near, which has a complex architecture but extremely detailed developer documentation, Vanar’s developer-friendliness is just passable; many times you still have to search for technical support answers in Discord among a bunch of nutritionally void GMs.
Since we’re discussing competitors, we must mention Flow and Aptos. Flow gained fame with NBA Top Shot, also focusing on IP and low costs, but its original Cadence language is downright a discouragement, as current developers don’t have time to learn a new language. Vanar is clever in this regard; it tightly sticks to EVM compatibility. I deployed a copyright confirmation contract that I previously ran on Polygon, and apart from changing the network configuration, I didn’t change a single line of code, and it deployed successfully. This painless migration is extremely tempting for project teams that have had enough of Gas fees on other chains. Polygon is currently too bloated, with both ZK and sidechains, and the ecosystem is filled with too many junk assets and projects of dubious quality, which is actually a downside for large brands and AI companies that require a compliant and clean environment. Although Vanar seems a bit quiet now, it wins in terms of a clean and controllable environment, which may actually become the first choice for legitimate entrants.
Another easily overlooked point is energy efficiency. Discussing environmental protection in our crypto circle indeed feels somewhat out of place and may even be dismissed as being overly liberal; however, if you've ever talked to the CTOs of NASDAQ-listed companies, you would know that ESG indicators are a hard threshold for them to integrate into blockchain. Training large models is itself an energy-intensive process, and if the underlying settlement layer is also a high-energy-consuming beast, the compliance department will absolutely not sign off. Vanar utilizes the Proof of Reputation mechanism to minimize energy consumption, which may not be seen as a positive by retail investors, as this usually means a higher degree of node centralization and weaker resistance to censorship. But for commercial applications, this is precisely an advantage. When I checked the block explorer, I found familiar big company names in the list of validating nodes; although it lacks some of the romanticism of decentralization, it adds a sense of solidity in commercial implementation.
The current Vanar ecosystem is like a luxurious but sparsely populated new district. I flipped through several pages of transaction records in the browser, most of which are still token transfers and interactions with a few official contracts; truly native blockbuster applications have yet to emerge. This is actually a death cycle faced by all emerging L1s: without users, there are no developers, and without developers, there are no users. Although they are trying to break the deadlock by attracting major IPs, converting IP into on-chain activity takes time. I’ve seen some GameFi projects emerging on the testnet, but the quality varies greatly. This reminds me of the early days of Solana, which also faced skepticism before StepN came out. Whether Vanar can succeed depends on whether it can incubate or attract a killer application that brings in millions of daily active users, even if it’s just a simple AI interactive game. For someone like me, who is a technical purist, Vanar's architectural design is not particularly stunning; it hasn’t produced any fundamental innovations like the Move language of Sui or Aptos, nor has it developed any complex theories of parallel execution. It’s more like an optimal engineering solution, combining existing technologies and making extreme optimizations for the high-frequency, low-cost demands of AI and the metaverse. This kind of pragmatism is quite rare in the Web3 world filled with air and bubbles. I wouldn't recommend anyone to buy it just for speculation, as its explosive cycle may be very long, long enough to make you question your life. But if you are a developer looking to create AI applications, or a long-term holder optimistic about the widespread adoption of Web3, spending some time studying its Gas model and API interface is definitely more valuable than just staring at candlestick charts. After all, in this industry, the ones that survive are often not those who shout the loudest, but those who can truly pave the way and get the vehicles moving.
