Let me put it this way...
When people argue about L1s and L2s, the conversation almost always turns into a speed debate. L2s are faster, L1s are slower, and that becomes the headline. But that’s not really how teams make decisions once they’re thinking beyond experiments and early users.
At that point, the question changes. It’s less about peak performance and more about responsibility. When something happens on the network, who is actually in charge of the outcome? Where does finality live? Who defines the rules without relying on another system behaving correctly?
That’s where L1 sovereignty starts to matter. In a sovereign L1 setup, the same network that processes transactions is also responsible for ownership, settlement, and execution logic. There isn’t an extra layer underneath or on top that needs to coordinate for the basics to work. Everything important happens in one place.
L2s aren’t a mistake. They exist because they solve real problems. They can reduce congestion and improve efficiency, especially in bursts. But they also add distance between action and finality. Sequencers, bridges, settlement windows — these are all reasonable design choices, but they are still additional assumptions. Most users don’t think about them directly, but they feel the effects when something takes longer than expected or behaves slightly differently under load.
Keeping things inside a single L1 removes a lot of that uncertainty. Assets don’t move across layers. State doesn’t wait to be finalized somewhere else. Developers don’t have to constantly think about which layer is responsible for which outcome. It’s not exciting architecture, but it’s easier to reason about as usage grows.
Consumer scale doesn’t just stress throughput. It stresses consistency. Fees behaving predictably. Transactions settling when people expect them to. The system feeling familiar even when activity spikes. These details seem small early on, but they compound quickly when real users are involved.
Vanar’s architecture reflects that way of thinking. Prioritize control and coherence first, then optimize speed within a structure the protocol fully owns. Instead of pushing complexity outward and hoping it stays invisible, deal with it directly at the base layer.
This isn’t about saying L1s are better or L2s are worse. It’s about choosing where complexity lives and how much coordination you’re willing to depend on over time. For consumer-facing systems, fewer moving parts often age better than clever shortcuts.
So the trade-off isn’t really speed versus slowness. It’s simplicity of responsibility versus layered coordination. Vanar’s choice leans toward the former, based on how systems behave once they’re no longer small. That’s the logic behind it.
