At half past three in the morning, the terminal window on the screen is still bouncing wildly, and this cup of instant coffee in my hand has gone cold. This feeling is all too familiar; the last time I stayed up this late was to grab the Arbitrum airdrop. I haven't been chasing those meme coins these days, but instead, I have been obsessively staring at the node data of Vanar Chain for a whole week. The reason is simple: recently, the news about the collaboration with Google Cloud has been making a lot of noise. My first reaction as an old investor is usually: here comes another PPT project trying to profit from the hype of a big Web2 company. But when I actually ran the node and delved into its underlying verification logic, I found that things seem to be more complicated than that. I can even say that my bias almost made me miss a player that truly has the potential to compete on a commercial level.
We must admit that the current public chain track is simply a gladiatorial arena. Solana runs rampant with high TPS, but its occasional crashes are like a ticking time bomb; Polygon, while having a large ecosystem, presents a nightmare for businesses looking to operate seriously due to congested gas fees and chaotic sidechain structures. My first impression of Vanar was very 'un-Crypto'; it was too quiet, as quiet as an enterprise-grade SaaS service. When I was configuring validation nodes, the smoothness made me even doubt whether I was deploying an AWS instance instead of struggling in a decentralized network. Typically, when running nodes on a new chain, you need to be prepared to battle errors with various dependency libraries, but with Vanar, pulling the Docker image and entering a few commands is all it takes to start syncing. This kind of 'industrial-grade' stability is probably the fundamental reason why Google Cloud is willing to get involved. Big companies are not foolish; they don't care how many times your coin price has multiplied; they care about SLA, whether problems can be held accountable, and whether data will be lost.
In this week's stress test, I specifically wrote a script to simulate thousands of concurrent requests to bombard its RPC interface. If it were on the Ethereum mainnet, this would purely be burning money; on BSC, the nodes would probably have started reporting timeouts long ago. But Vanar's feedback is very interesting; its gas fee curve is as flat as a recently deceased electrocardiogram. No matter how much I increase the concurrency, the cost of a single transaction is firmly nailed down in that extremely low range. This may be imperceptible to retail investors since they don't care about the difference of one or two cents, but for companies looking to integrate AI Agents into the blockchain, this is a crucial issue. Imagine if your AI customer service has to process tens of thousands of data rights every second; if gas fees fluctuate slightly, your profit model could collapse instantly. Vanar's almost obsessive cost control is clearly not meant for everyone to speculate, but rather to keep the machines running.
However, technology aside, there are still issues with the user experience. When I was using their Creator Pad to test asset issuance, it felt like suddenly moving from a five-star hotel to a bare-bones apartment. They have all the functions, but the details are so rough that it drives you crazy. Uploading a 300MB 3D model file, the progress bar stuck at 99% and wouldn't budge; I refreshed three times before it finally succeeded. These small frontend interaction bugs, while not affecting on-chain data security, are absolutely discouraging for users accustomed to smooth Web2 applications. Moreover, the browser's indexing speed occasionally can't keep up with the block speed; I had already seen the transaction hash, but the browser still couldn't find it, making me think I encountered a ghost transaction. These issues indicate that the team has invested heavily in infrastructure, but they still lack some refinement in polishing the product aimed at the consumer end.
Since we're talking about competing products, we must mention Render and Near. Render focuses on computing power leasing, which is more fundamental; Near has a very sexy technical architecture and does sharding well, but the development barrier is absurdly high, with the Rust language blocking half of the developers. What makes Vanar smart is that it does not engage in technical innovation but rather in 'experience innovation.' What does complete EVM compatibility mean? It means I can directly port that ready-made code from Ethereum with just a change in RPC configuration. This kind of 'borrowing' may not seem cool in the eyes of geeks, but in business warfare, this is called dimensionality reduction. Today's developers are too tired; no one is willing to learn a new language for an uncertain future, and Vanar provides them with the path of least resistance.
Another interesting observation is that I surprisingly saw several shadows of traditional tech giants in Vanar's list of node validators. To decentralized fundamentalists, this seems like heresy, believing it's a move towards consortium chains. But from my perspective, this is precisely the reason it can survive. The future of Web3 can never just be a geek's toy if it doesn't connect with the capital, technology, and compliance of Web2. By introducing enterprise-level credibility through the Vanguard mechanism, Vanar is actually building a 'whitelist' network. In this network, Nike dares to issue NFTs, and Disney dares to build a metaverse because they know that the underlying validation nodes are not some unknown basement miner but a regular army with legal entities.
To be honest, the current Vanar ecosystem is a bit like a newly built ghost town. The roads are extremely well constructed, with dual eight-lane traffic and bright streetlights, but there are no cars on the road. Aside from the few official sample projects, there are pitifully few truly community-driven native applications. This is also the deadlock faced by all new L1s: without users, there are no developers; without developers, there are no users. Vanar is trying to break the impasse by introducing big IPs; this strategy is logically sound but extremely difficult to execute. After all, converting IP into on-chain activity takes time, and in the current market environment, users are more interested in where they can find a promising project than in IP. Vanar's overly 'serious' demeanor makes it hard to generate the kind of explosive traffic that comes with sudden wealth.
But this makes me feel it's worth the wait. In a time when the screen is filled with AI bubbles and every project dares to call itself an AI computing power layer, a project like Vanar that earnestly focuses on infrastructure, compliance, and strategic partnerships stands out as an anomaly. It isn't sexy, it can even be a bit boring, but the low-cost, high-stability infrastructure it holds might well be the only landing point when AI applications explode in the next bull market. After all, when the tide goes out, you can tell who has been swimming naked, and Vanar looks like the one who has put on a wetsuit and is ready for deep diving.