I kept coming back to the same small annoyance that Vanar seems oddly obsessed with: the kind of fee you don’t notice until it ruins your day.
If you’ve ever tried to run anything on-chain at scale—an app that triggers lots of small transactions, a backend service that settles actions in batches, even a simple workflow that fires repeatedly—you learn quickly that the fee problem isn’t always “too expensive.” It’s that it’s impossible to plan around. One week it’s cheap enough to ignore. The next week the exact same action costs ten times more because the network is busy or the pricing dynamics shifted. Accounting hates that. Product teams hate that. Anyone trying to promise a stable user experience hates that.
Vanar’s story starts there. Not with a grand prophecy, but with a practical complaint: fees shouldn’t behave like a mood ring.
The project’s documents keep repeating the same idea in different words: turn fees into something predictable, closer to a posted rate than a live auction. Their proposed fix is simple to say and hard to pull off: charge fees in a way that stays steady in dollar terms, even though users still pay with the chain’s token. The protocol does the conversion in the background and updates it on a schedule, so you don’t wake up to a new reality every time the token price moves.
That’s the pitch. The interesting part is how they try to make it real—and what it quietly depends on.
The first detail most people miss: “fixed fees” doesn’t mean every transaction costs the same. Vanar sets up tiers. A small, common transaction is supposed to sit in a cheap bracket—Vanar’s docs describe a target around $0.0005 for the simplest band, which is the kind of number you’d expect in a consumer app where transactions are frequent and nobody wants to think about it. Bigger, heavier transactions climb into higher brackets quickly. In the whitepaper, those suggested tiers jump to amounts like $1.5, $3, $7.5, even $15 depending on how much gas the transaction burns.
That jump isn’t accidental. Vanar is trying to solve a real problem that low-fee chains run into: if everything costs fractions of a cent, it can be cheap to spam the network. The whitepaper spells it out with a straightforward example: if an attacker can fill blocks with large transactions that each cost almost nothing, they can clog the chain for hours at pocket-change cost. If those same transactions fall into a tier that costs dollars, the same attack becomes expensive enough that it’s no longer a casual prank.
So the fee schedule is doing two jobs at once. It’s trying to keep ordinary usage cheap and consistent, and it’s trying to make abusive usage hurt.
Now comes the part that makes the whole model both clever and a little uncomfortable: to keep fees stable in dollars, Vanar needs a way to know what a dollar is worth in VANRY at any given moment.
A blockchain doesn’t naturally know that. It has to be told.
Vanar’s documentation describes an internal pricing setup that regularly fetches VANRY’s market price from multiple sources, throws out obvious outliers, then uses the result as the reference point the protocol reads when it calculates the current fee amounts. Think of it like this: the chain has a price dial, and every so often it checks the market and nudges the dial so the “$0.0005” target stays roughly true.
Vanar even gives the cadence: update fee parameters every 100 blocks. That matters because it reveals what kind of stability they’re aiming for. It’s not “fees never change.” It’s “fees change in controlled steps, on a schedule, for a reason.”
If you squint, it feels less like a pure free market and more like a service with a posted price list that gets refreshed periodically.
There’s also a fallback: if the fee system can’t retrieve the updated schedule—say the service is down or times out—the chain reuses the previous fee parameters instead of freezing up. That’s sensible engineering, but it also highlights the trade-off Vanar is making. Traditional fee markets are chaotic, but they don’t depend on a pricing service. Vanar’s model is calmer, but now you have a new thing that must keep working, keep updating, and stay trustworthy.
And this is where the “human” part of the story creeps in, because it’s not just code. Someone has to run that machinery.
Vanar’s docs point to the Vanar Foundation as part of the fee management picture. That’s not shocking—lots of projects have foundations doing critical coordination—but it does change what “predictable” really means. Under this model, predictability is partly a governance promise: that the people running the pricing logic will do it carefully, transparently, and defensibly when things get messy.
That messiness isn’t hypothetical. Imagine the token price moves sharply in a short window. Or liquidity on one venue goes thin and prints a weird price. Or an attacker tries to nudge the reference price by manipulating one source. Vanar’s approach is to use multiple sources and outlier filtering, which helps. But the deeper truth remains: stable dollar fees require a stable pricing reference, and a stable reference requires ongoing stewardship.
Vanar also talks about transaction ordering with a similar “make it feel normal” mindset. The whitepaper leans on FIFO—first in, first out—suggesting transactions should be processed in a straightforward queue rather than behaving like a bidding war where higher fees jump the line. Strict FIFO is tricky in real distributed networks, because different validators can see transactions in different orders. Still, the intention fits the broader theme: fees shouldn’t be a daily strategy game.
When you zoom out, the fee design starts to look connected to how Vanar describes its validator setup. The documentation explains a Proof-of-Authority style approach with reputation—starting with foundation-operated validators and later allowing external validators under defined conditions. That kind of controlled environment can make it easier to enforce operational promises early on. It’s also why skeptics will ask what happens later, as the validator set grows and incentives get more complicated. Systems tend to be most “predictable” when fewer parties can change the rules.
There’s another context clue in Vanar’s history: the VANRY token swap and the project’s lineage from earlier token structures. It signals continuity, not a brand-new chain trying to invent itself from nothing. And continuity matters because projects with consumer-facing roots often care more about frictionless micro-actions than about headline-grabbing technical feats. A user doing lots of tiny actions doesn’t want to think about fees. A developer building that experience doesn’t want to keep rewriting their pricing assumptions.
That’s where Vanar’s “quiet edge” actually sits.
Not in bragging rights. In something boring but useful: making costs behave like something you can put in a budget and stop thinking about.
But I don’t think it’s fair to treat that as an automatic win. The model shifts risk rather than deleting it. It moves unpredictability away from end users and into a managed system—price aggregation, tier schedules, update rules, and governance choices about how strict or flexible those tiers should be.
If Vanar runs that system well, developers get something rare: a fee environment where the cost of routine activity is stable enough to model. If it runs poorly, the failure won’t look like a dramatic “fees exploded overnight” headline. It’ll look like drift, confusion, and arguments about whether the fee model is being administered fairly.
That’s the real investigation angle here: Vanar is trying to turn a fee market into a fee policy. The upside is calmer economics. The cost is that someone has to be responsible for keeping the policy honest.