When I looked at Vanar for the first time, my immediate reaction wasn’t excitement it was fatigue. Another Layer 1 claiming to sit at the “intersection of AI, gaming, and real world assets” sounds like a perfectly optimized pitch deck sentence. I’ve been in this space long enough to know that most L1s aren’t actually differentiated; they’re variations of the same template with different branding, tokenomics, and performance metrics. Faster TPS, cheaper fees, more scalability none of that really feels meaningful anymore when user adoption is still thin and most activity is circular.
That’s the problem with a lot of Web3 narratives today. They’re infrastructure first stories in a world that still doesn’t have real users. DeFi dominates mindshare, but it’s largely a closed loop of traders, protocols, and liquidity providers recycling capital. NFTs had their moment, gaming never quite escaped speculation, and AI is now the new narrative wrapper for everything. So my baseline with Vanar was skepticism: why does the world need yet another chain?
What made me pause, though, is that Vanar doesn’t seem to be positioning itself primarily as “financial infrastructure.” The core framing is consumer facing entertainment, gaming, brands, AI agents, and real world digital experiences. In theory, that’s exactly where most L1s fail. They build for developers, not users. They optimize for composability and throughput, not UX, distribution, or cultural relevance.
Vanar feels like it’s at least trying to invert that. The emphasis isn’t on becoming the next DeFi settlement layer, but on becoming a consumer operating system for on-chain experiences. That’s a subtle but important shift.
The real differentiator isn’t performance, it’s abstraction. Vanar’s pitch is basically: users shouldn’t have to know they’re using a blockchain. Wallets, gas, signing, bridges these things are normal to us, but completely alien to mainstream users. If Web3 ever goes beyond crypto-native circles, most of that complexity has to disappear. Gaming, entertainment platforms, and brand experiences don’t scale if every interaction feels like using a developer tool.
This is where the AI angle becomes interesting, but also easy to overhype. The idea of AI agents interacting with on-chain assets owning, trading, managing, or even “playing” on behalf of users sounds futuristic, but it actually maps to a real problem: humans are bad at managing complexity.
If smart agents can abstract on chain logic into natural interfaces, that could be one of the first genuinely useful applications of AI in Web3, beyond bots and analytics dashboards.
Still, the question is whether this is real infrastructure or just narrative layering. A lot of projects now say “AI + blockchain” without a clear reason why those two things need to be combined. In Vanar’s case, the argument is that AI becomes the interface layer, and blockchain becomes the ownership layer.
That separation makes conceptual sense. AI handles interaction and automation; the chain handles assets, identity, and provenance.
Where this becomes more credible is in entertainment and gaming. These are environments where users already accept virtual economies, digital items, and automated systems.
If a game integrates AI driven characters that actually own assets on chain, or a media platform uses AI agents to manage IP rights or digital collectibles, the blockchain part becomes invisible but still essential. That’s the kind of adoption that doesn’t look like “crypto,” but still uses crypto rails.
And that’s the key distinction: consumer adoption doesn’t come from people wanting to use blockchains. It comes from people wanting to use products that happen to use blockchains.
Most L1s don’t seem to internalize that. They build ecosystems for other crypto projects, not for actual users. You end up with chains full of DEXs, bridges, staking protocols, and synthetic assets but no reason for someone outside crypto to ever care. It’s an economy without an external demand curve.
Vanar’s focus on brands and real world assets is an attempt to fix that. Not in the “tokenize everything” sense, but in the sense of integrating with existing consumer industries. Entertainment platforms already understand distribution. Brands already understand user acquisition. If blockchain infrastructure can sit underneath those systems without forcing users to become crypto native, that’s probably the only realistic path to scale.
Of course, this is also where regulatory friction becomes unavoidable. Anything touching real-world assets, consumer data, or branded experiences exists in a much stricter environment than DeFi. DeFi lives in a regulatory gray zone; consumer platforms don’t. KYC, compliance, content moderation, IP rights these aren’t optional. If Vanar really wants to be a consumer L1, it’s going to face constraints that most crypto projects simply ignore.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it might be a filter. Most chains avoid regulation because it slows them down and complicates narratives. But if the end goal is mainstream adoption, regulation isn’t an obstacle it’s part of the terrain. You can’t build consumer infrastructure and pretend you’re still in experimental cyberspace.
This brings me to the token, VANRY. Token utility is where almost every L1 story breaks down. In theory, the token secures the network, pays for gas, aligns incentives, and captures value from usage. In practice, most tokens are financial instruments first and utility assets second. Their main use case is speculation.
For Vanar, the challenge is obvious: if users don’t even know they’re on a blockchain, do they ever meaningfully interact with the token? Or does VANRY become something only developers, validators, and traders care about?
There’s a tension here. True UX abstraction reduces friction, but it also reduces the visibility of the token. If gas is subsidized, bundled, or hidden, the token’s role becomes infrastructural rather than experiential. That’s fine from a product standpoint, but it changes the investment narrative. You’re no longer betting on retail demand for the token; you’re betting on enterprise and platform-level adoption.
In that sense, VANRY’s value depends less on hype cycles and more on whether real products actually build on Vanar and attract real users. Not wallets. Not TVL. Actual daily users who don’t think of themselves as crypto users at all.
This is where I think most people misread the next phase of Web3. It’s probably not DeFi driven. DeFi is powerful, but it’s niche. It’s financial infrastructure for people who already care about financial infrastructure. The next wave is more likely consumer: games, media, social platforms, digital identity, and AI-powered services that quietly use blockchain in the background.
That doesn’t mean DeFi disappears. It just stops being the center of gravity.
Vanar’s bet is essentially that consumer experiences will lead, and financial primitives will follow. That’s the inverse of how most L1s are built. They start with finance and hope culture shows up later. Vanar is trying to start with culture and let finance be invisible.
It’s a risky strategy. Consumer markets are brutal. Distribution is expensive. Competing with Web2 platforms means competing with companies that already have billions of users and infinite capital. Crypto doesn’t magically solve product-market fit.
But at the same time, it’s one of the few strategies that actually makes sense long term. We don’t need more blockchains for traders. We need blockchains for people who don’t know what a blockchain is.
My skepticism isn’t about whether Vanar’s vision is coherent it is. My skepticism is about execution. Consumer infrastructure is hard. AI integration is hard. Regulatory alignment is hard. And the crypto space is very good at storytelling, much less good at building durable products.
Still, if I compare Vanar to the typical “high performance L1” narrative, it at least feels pointed in the right direction. It’s not trying to win the same race everyone else is running. It’s not obsessed with being faster than Solana or more decentralized than Ethereum. It’s asking a different question: what would a blockchain look like if it was designed for users, not for crypto insiders?
That question alone is more interesting than most whitepapers I’ve read in the last few years.
Whether Vanar succeeds or not almost feels secondary. The broader insight is that Web3’s next phase probably won’t be defined by new financial protocols or yield strategies. It’ll be defined by whether anyone outside crypto starts using on chain systems without realizing it. If that happens, the winning platforms won’t look like “blockchains” at all. They’ll look like games, apps, AI services, and digital experiences.
Vanar is positioning itself inside that future. Not loudly. Not perfectly. But at least directionally, it’s aligned with where real adoption might actually come from.
And in a space full of redundant infrastructure, that alone makes it worth watching critically, not optimistically.
