Vanar’s “products first, chain second” idea only makes sense if you picture how most crypto projects actually fail.
They build a chain like it’s a cathedral—shiny consensus diagrams, huge throughput claims, a block explorer, a staking page—and then they stand there waiting for life to happen. And life rarely happens, because normal people don’t wake up wanting a blockchain. They wake up wanting to play something, trade something, create something, store something, prove something, or earn something—without needing a second brain just to get started.
Vanar’s bet is that the order should be reversed. You win the right to have infrastructure by shipping things people can touch. Products that feel like consumer software first… and only later does the user realize there’s a blockchain underneath it all, doing the boring work.
The project’s own history kind of telegraphs that mindset. The ecosystem grew out of Virtua and then moved through a clean identity shift via the TVK → VANRY rebrand and swap that major exchanges publicly documented, including the explicit 1:1 ratio. That detail isn’t just trivia—it’s a sign that Vanar wanted to stop being perceived as “one app” and start being seen as a broader base layer that can support multiple products without everything being trapped inside a single brand.
Where the “products first” part starts to feel real is in how Vanar talks about experiences. Instead of selling you on “a chain,” it keeps pointing at surfaces: marketplaces, communities, AI tools, and workflows that sit closer to where people already spend attention. Its own public messaging around Neutron and MyNeutron leans hard into the idea that data shouldn’t just be stored, it should work—that files shouldn’t go dark, that information should become structured, queryable, and reusable in a way that suits agents and apps.
That’s a very specific kind of ambition, and it’s not the same as “we’re another EVM chain.” Neutron is framed as a system that compresses and restructures data into “Seeds” that are “fully onchain” and “fully verifiable,” with marketing claims like compressing 25MB into 50KB through layered techniques. Whether you personally buy those claims or want to see deeper technical proofs, the direction is clear: Vanar is trying to make onchain data feel less like dead storage and more like programmable memory.
Then MyNeutron tries to turn that into something a normal person can actually use. The pitch is almost painfully relatable: people bounce between AI platforms and lose context every time. MyNeutron positions itself as a portable “knowledgebase” across tools people already recognize—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini—and says it can be “anchored” on Vanar when you want permanence. That’s the products-first philosophy in plain clothes: don’t start with a wallet lecture; start with a real pain point, and make the blockchain optional until the user cares about durability.
Now, “chain second” doesn’t mean “chain doesn’t matter.” It means the chain is supposed to behave like infrastructure: stable, compatible, and boring in the best way.
Vanar’s docs describe an architecture rooted in Geth as the execution layer bedrock, paired with a hybrid consensus posture that’s described as Proof of Authority governed by Proof of Reputation. In human terms, that reads like: keep block production predictable early on, reduce chaos for product teams, and use a reputation-gated pathway for bringing in validators over time. The docs are also explicit that the foundation initially runs validator nodes, with external onboarding through the PoR mechanism.
That design choice is not universally loved in crypto circles, and it shouldn’t be brushed aside. A more permissioned posture can absolutely help consumer experiences—fewer weird edge cases, fewer reliability disasters—especially if your goal is to support applications where users don’t tolerate friction. But it also creates an obvious question: how quickly does the network widen, and how transparently? The “products first” thesis only stays credible if the “chain second” part doesn’t become “chain forever controlled.” Vanar’s own documentation frames PoR as the on-ramp for expanding validator participation, so the real test is execution and follow-through, not the phrasing.
Token design also tries to match that long-run mindset. Vanar’s documentation caps max supply at 2.4 billion and frames additional issuance (beyond genesis) as block rewards—i.e., security incentives are treated as a long game. Third-party disclosures like the Kraken UK cryptoasset statement also describe the 2.4B supply and present a distribution snapshot. (One thing I’d genuinely encourage here: treat any single snapshot as “a view at a point in time,” and cross-check against the latest official docs and onchain data, because token distribution narratives can drift as documentation updates.)
There’s also a subtle but important emotional truth underneath all of this: Vanar is chasing the kind of adoption that’s humiliatingly hard. It’s easier to build a chain than to build a product people love. It’s easier to get a listing than to get retention. It’s easier to get a community to speculate than it is to get a community to use.
So if you want to understand Vanar’s thesis the human way, it’s this:
They’re not trying to convince the world to care about a blockchain. They’re trying to build things the world already cares about—play, identity, trade, memory, proof—and then quietly let the chain do the background work. If it becomes successful, the average user won’t say “I used Vanar today.” They’ll say, “I did my thing… and it didn’t break.”
And that’s the whole point of “products first, chain second.”