I keep coming back to Vanar for one reason: it is trying to make blockspace feel like a billable service unit instead of a moving target. The fixed fee model framed in dollar terms is basically the chain saying you should be able to predict your cost before you ask a user to sign. That is a payments mindset, not a trader mindset, and it changes what builders can promise inside an app without quietly turning into a fee management desk.
When fees behave like a fluctuating auction, the product team ends up designing around uncertainty. Wallets add buffers, merchants add minimums, retries become normal, and support tickets pile up because users do not care why a transaction failed, they only remember that it failed. Vanar is pushing that uncertainty down into protocol policy so the application layer does not have to keep reinventing defensive logic. If that works, it removes a real source of friction that most chains treat as background noise.
The tiered fee schedule is the part that feels most deliberate. The chain is choosing to protect the common path and punish the heavy path. Small everyday actions sit in the lowest tier, and larger transactions get priced through multipliers. The goal is simple to state: keep the normal user experience stable while making it expensive to abuse the network with oversized payloads. In payment flows, that stability is not a nice to have, it is the difference between a system you can build on and a system you can only experiment with.
But here is the uncomfortable truth: the moment you hard code predictability, you also hard code a new set of ways it can break. A dollar targeted fee needs constant, reliable translation back into the gas token. If the mapping updates lag during fast price moves, users get mispriced execution. If the mapping is too reactive, the system can churn and create edge inconsistencies that wallets cannot model cleanly. This becomes a discipline problem. The chain has to prove it can keep the gap between the target and the realized cost tight over time, not just in calm periods.
Tiering creates another real tension. If tiers are driven primarily by size, then adversaries will look for cheap ways to do expensive work while still looking small on paper. That is how networks get clogged without fees rising in the way the designers expected. Payment grade infrastructure is always tested at the margin, by the weird transactions and the hostile traffic, not by the median user sending a normal transfer.
Vanar’s validator model also reads like a conscious trade rather than an accident. A reputation governed authority approach with foundation run validators early on resembles how traditional payment networks actually operate: controlled membership, known operators, and coordinated standards. That can improve uptime and incident response in the early phase. It can also make enterprise partners more comfortable because the network does not pretend that everyone is anonymous and equal in operational responsibility.
The risk is obvious and it is not philosophical, it is operational. Concentrated operators mean correlated failures. A region wide outage, a hosting dependency, or a governance event can have a bigger blast radius when control is narrow. If you are building payments, you care about tail events. Your users will not forgive the rare day everything goes sideways. So the path from foundation operated to a broader, independently run validator set is not a cosmetic decentralization story, it is a reliability story with measurable consequences.
Even the green hosting acceptance rule is a double edged blade. Filters can push validators toward higher quality infrastructure, but they can also reduce geographic diversity and accidentally cluster the validator set. Diversity is not ideology in payments, it is redundancy. If many validators end up sharing the same underlying network or region characteristics, the chain can look stable until the day it suddenly is not.
I also think people underestimate the governance weight of a fixed tier fee schedule. Once builders set product pricing, micro fee absorption, and checkout thresholds around stable low tier costs, fee parameters stop being a tweak and start being a contract. If tiers or multipliers change too often or without a slow and legible process, you get ecosystem wide whiplash. Payment grade rails earn trust by moving slowly on policy while moving fast on reliability.
If you want to evaluate Vanar like infrastructure, the right scoreboard is boring but decisive. How tightly does the realized USD cost of a standard lowest tier action track the target through volatility. How often does gas estimation diverge from what gets charged. What does the confirmation time distribution look like in normal hours versus stress hours. How quickly does the validator set expand beyond the initial structure, and how concentrated is stake and uptime across the top operators. Those numbers are the difference between a chain that feels predictable and a chain that only claims it.
Base case looks like this. The fee translation stays disciplined, so the lowest tier cost remains within a narrow USD band most of the time. Wallets do not need big buffers, failed transaction rates remain low, and confirmation times stay predictable across regular demand cycles. Validator onboarding progresses steadily so concentration risk declines quarter by quarter, and usage grows in repetitive, payment like actions rather than bursty speculative spikes.
Stress case is driven by measurable drift. Rapid token price moves or thin liquidity cause the fee mapping to lag, widening the gap between target fees and realized cost. Wallets see more underestimation, retries increase, and confirmation times develop a long tail during congestion because fixed fee systems need a clear inclusion policy when blocks are full. Validator growth stalls, operational concentration stays high, and outages or governance shocks create outsized disruption.