I did because something about Vanar didn’t line up with how people were talking about it. The commentary kept circling features—throughput, tooling, partnerships—while the behavior of the network itself told a quieter story. The kind of story you only see if you stop looking at what’s being shipped and start looking at what’s being charged for, where value settles, and who actually gets paid when something happens on-chain.
When I first looked at Vanar closely, what struck me wasn’t a single technical choice. It was the absence of a familiar crutch. No obvious rent-extraction layer. No off-chain entity quietly deciding pricing, subsidies, or who gets favored access. Instead, there was something more unusual underneath: a business model that doesn’t sit next to the chain, but inside it.
Most blockchains claim decentralization while running very centralized economics. Fees are tuned off-chain. Incentives are tweaked by committees. Value flows are governed by social consensus more than code. On the surface, this works—until usage grows. Then the gaps appear. Costs rise in places no one predicted. Certain actors quietly accumulate leverage. The network keeps running, but the texture changes. It becomes brittle.
Vanar’s bet is that if the business model itself lives on-chain, those pressures surface earlier and get resolved more cleanly. That sounds abstract, so it’s worth breaking down what that actually means.
On the surface, Vanar still looks like a blockchain that supports applications, transactions, and users. Fees are paid. Validators are rewarded. Nothing radical there. Underneath, though, the way economic value is routed is unusually explicit. Instead of revenue being an emergent side effect, it’s a first-class system.
Take fees. In many networks, fees are just tolls—paid by users, captured by validators, maybe partially burned. On Vanar, fees are signals. They move through smart contracts that define how value is split, redirected, or reinvested. That means the network doesn’t just collect money; it expresses intent about where that money should go.
Translate that out of technical language and it becomes simpler: the chain is not just infrastructure, it’s accounting. And accounting shapes behavior.
Once you see that, other design choices start to make sense. Applications on Vanar aren’t just consumers of blockspace. They’re participants in a shared economic graph. If an app drives usage, some portion of the value that usage creates can flow back to it automatically, without side deals or foundation grants. That changes the incentive to build. You’re not betting on token price appreciation alone; you’re earning revenue in real time, on-chain.
This is where the business model part becomes concrete. Vanar isn’t saying “build here because we’re fast.” It’s saying “build here because the network itself pays you when you create value.” That’s a very different pitch, and it carries risks.
One obvious counterargument is complexity. Putting business logic on-chain can ossify decisions that should remain flexible. Markets change. User behavior shifts. If you hard-code economic flows, you might lock in assumptions that don’t hold. That’s fair. Vanar’s answer, at least so far, seems to be modularity rather than rigidity. Economic parameters can be adjusted through governance, but the pathways—the fact that value flows are transparent and enforced—remain intact.
Another concern is capture. If everything is on-chain, sophisticated actors might game it faster than humans can respond. Early signs suggest Vanar is aware of this tradeoff. Rate limits, caps, and feedback loops are baked in. That doesn’t eliminate risk, but it changes its shape. Instead of silent extraction, you get visible pressure. And visible pressure can be debated.
What this enables, if it holds, is steadier growth. Not the explosive, hype-driven kind, but something earned. When builders can see exactly how value moves, they can model sustainability instead of hoping for it. When validators know what they’re paid and why, they optimize less for short-term spikes and more for uptime and reliability. When users understand what their fees support, trust accumulates quietly.
There’s also a subtle second-order effect. Because the business model lives on-chain, data about it does too. You can observe where revenue concentrates, where it thins out, where incentives misalign. That kind of visibility is rare in tech. Most platforms hide their economics behind dashboards and quarterly reports. Here, it’s just there, block by block.
Meanwhile, this helps explain why Vanar seems less obsessed with headline features. If your core bet is economic coherence, feature velocity matters less than incentive alignment. You don’t need to be everything to everyone. You need to be predictable. Boring, even. There’s strength in that, especially as markets mature.
Zooming out, this feels connected to a larger pattern. The last wave of blockchain innovation focused on scaling and composability. Necessary work, but incomplete. Scaling without sustainable economics just accelerates failure. Composability without aligned incentives creates fragility. What comes next has to address the business layer more directly.
Vanar’s approach suggests one answer: stop pretending economics is an afterthought. Treat it as infrastructure. Put it where it can be audited, contested, and evolved in the open. That doesn’t guarantee success. It might even slow adoption in the short term. Not everyone wants to think about where value goes.
But early signs suggest a certain type of builder does. The ones who care less about grants and more about cash flow. The ones who want their work to compound rather than depend on constant fundraising. If that cohort grows, networks that internalize their business models may have an edge that’s hard to copy.
Of course, this remains to be seen. Markets have a way of humbling theories. Governance can stall. Incentives can drift. On-chain systems can still be captured, just more visibly. None of this is magic. It’s a trade.
Still, when I look at Vanar now, I don’t see a chain trying to out-feature its peers. I see a quieter bet: that the hardest part of building decentralized systems isn’t code, it’s money—and that putting the business model on-chain forces you to confront that from day one.
If that holds, the most unusual thing about Vanar won’t be what it does. It will be what it refuses to hide.