F I N K Y

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.

#vanar @Vanarchain $VANRY

I kept bumping into the same contradiction with Fogo.

On one hand, the project reads like it was put together by people who care about systems behaving under stress. Not the glossy “vision” stuff—more like the dull, unforgiving details: how long it takes a transaction to really settle, what happens when the network is congested, how far a validator is from the action, which node becomes the bottleneck at the worst possible moment. Their own writing spends time on tail latency and routing paths, the kind of things you usually only obsess over after something breaks in production.

On the other hand, the token trades like… a token. It moves when attention shows up. It wobbles when early holders take profit. It doesn’t behave like a long-term savings instrument because, structurally, it hasn’t been given a reason to.

That’s the story here. Fogo is trying to build a fast venue. The token is still trying to justify being held.

If you’ve been around crypto long enough, you can guess how this plays out in the early chapters. A narrative forms (“fast chain,” “trading-first,” “SVM,” “Firedancer”), liquidity arrives, and suddenly the market treats the token like a live grenade. Everybody wants exposure, nobody wants to be the last person holding it after the peak hour passes.

The January 2026 listing announcement was one of those “physics changes” moments. When Binance lists something, it doesn’t certify the technology. It changes the token’s environment: more liquidity, more speculators, more short-term positioning, more people who don’t care what the chain does as long as the chart gives them an exit. That’s not cynicism; it’s just what listings do.

Before that, there was already a hint that the team understood how touchy distribution optics can be. Public reporting in December 2025 suggested Fogo cancelled a planned token presale and shifted more emphasis to an airdrop-style distribution. Whether you see that as principled or tactical, it has real consequences. Airdrops put tokens into a lot of hands, fast—and many of those hands will sell quickly because they didn’t buy in, they received it. “Found money” has a short half-life.

So you get the classic pattern: a wide distribution plus a liquidity event equals high turnover. And high turnover is the enemy of “holding value.”

Now add the more subtle issue: Fogo’s product design, if it works, actually makes the holding problem harder.

The documents describe a network built around quick execution and smooth user flows—especially for trading. One of the more practical ideas is “Sessions,” where you sign once to create a scoped, temporary key so you’re not constantly approving every action. It’s like the project looked at the most annoying parts of on-chain UX and said, “We’re not doing that.

This is great… for users.

But notice what it implies. The easier you make the chain to use, the less you force people to hold the token. If apps can sponsor fees and sessions reduce friction, the average user might interact with Fogo without ever thinking about FOGO. They don’t build an emotional relationship with the asset. They treat it like plumbing.

Plumbing doesn’t get diamond hands.

And the token economics, as described in the official documents, don’t magically solve that. There’s staking. There are validator rewards. There’s inflation that steps down over time. There’s a burn mechanism on part of the base fee. All normal parts of a modern chain.

But normal isn’t supportive.

If the base fee is deliberately tiny (because you want the chain to feel cheap and fast), then burning half of it doesn’t automatically create scarcity. It can become a nice statistic that doesn’t move the needle unless the network is processing a truly absurd amount of activity. Meanwhile, priority fees—when they exist—tend to go to validators. Validators, being real businesses with real costs, often sell what they earn. That’s not villain behavior. That’s operations.

So you end up with a token that has reasons to be used, but not yet enough reasons to be kept.

That’s the part people tend to skip in the hype cycles. They talk as if speed alone creates value, as if a chain that’s optimized for trading will automatically produce a token that behaves like a trophy asset.

It doesn’t. Sometimes it produces the opposite: a high-velocity token that is constantly circulating, constantly earned, constantly sold, constantly repurchased. Lots of activity, not much stillness.

And the market is brutally honest about that distinction.

When you look at the token today on the big trackers, what you see is a liquid instrument: a price in the cents, a large circulating supply, and daily volumes that signal frequent rotation. That’s not a verdict on the project’s engineering. It’s a clue about who the dominant participants are right now: traders, airdrop recipients, and short-term allocators.

That mix can change, but it has to be earned.

If Fogo wants the token to “learn to hold value,” it needs a holder base that behaves differently. Not because they’re more loyal, but because they have a structural reason to hold inventory. In practice, that usually comes from a handful of sources:

Real usage at scale, so even small fees become meaningful in aggregate. Applications that keep balances because they’re constantly sponsoring interactions. DeFi protocols that start treating the token as serious collateral. Market makers who warehouse supply because the venue is profitable enough to justify it. Predictability around supply dynamics so the market stops feeling like it’s playing a game of “guess the next unlock.

And, maybe most importantly, one flagship product that makes normal users show up even when the incentive programs and launch excitement fade. Crypto doesn’t like admitting this, but most chains don’t win on technology alone. They win on a single killer use case that turns “interesting” into “habit.”

The reason Fogo is worth watching is that the project seems to understand the arena it’s entering. Its writing is unusually practical. It doesn’t try to impress you with vague metaphors. It talks like a team that wants to run a venue where trades don’t feel like prayers.

But the token is still in the awkward stage where speed is a compelling story and value retention is an unfinished one.

So the line “Fogo runs fast but the token must learn to hold value” isn’t a dunk. It’s a diagnosis.

The network can succeed and still leave the token struggling if the value flows mostly to users (cheap transactions), and operators (fees), without creating a strong reason for the wider market to keep FOGO as an asset.

In the end, Fogo’s real test won’t be whether it can post impressive latency numbers. It’ll be whether the chain becomes important enough that holding FOGO stops feeling like a speculative choice and starts feeling like a practical one.

Right now, Fogo is sprinting.

FOGO still looks like it’s deciding whether it wants to be money, fuel, or just something you pass through on the way to somewhere else.

#fogo @Fogo Official $FOGO

On the third day of learning mahjong, you start doing everything right.

You stop grabbing random tiles because they look promising. You learn the legal shapes. You count what you have, what you need, what you’re allowed to claim. The whole thing finally feels orderly.

And then you lose anyway.

Not because you broke a rule—because you still don’t know what the table is doing. Someone’s feeding tiles to their partner. Someone’s slow-playing a hand. Someone’s forcing you into bad discards. The rules are real, but they’re not the point. They’re just the entrance fee.

That’s the closest analogy I’ve found for what happens to careful people in crypto.

The careful ones read announcements. They follow official instructions. They take screenshots of swap ratios. They think diligence is a shield. When they get hurt, it’s rarely because they didn’t try hard enough. It’s because the market punishes a different mistake: confusing “correct procedure” with “control.

Vanar Chain—VANRY, the token people trade—sits right in the middle of that lesson. Not because it’s uniquely evil or uniquely brilliant. Because its history is full of the exact moments where rule-followers tend to get clipped: rebranding, token swaps, liquidity shifts, and an identity that keeps stretching to fit whatever narrative the cycle is paying attention to.

If you only read the project’s own material, Vanar’s pitch sounds tidy. The whitepaper is unusually obsessed with one thing that normal users don’t talk about until it hurts: fees. It argues that unpredictable transaction costs make consumer apps hard to run, and it proposes a model where the transaction fee is pinned to a stable dollar value—even if the token price moves. It even prints a target number: down to $0.0005 per transaction, with finality aiming around three seconds. It also signals that it’s built on familiar foundations (Go Ethereum), which is a subtle way of saying: we’re not reinventing every wheel.

That’s the “engineer’s” version of the story.

But Vanar’s story isn’t mainly about engineering. It’s about a pivot—and pivots are where people who follow instructions get hurt.

Before VANRY existed, there was TVK. Public profiles describe the earlier project under the Virtua name—more digital collectibles, metaverse-adjacent—then frame late 2023 as the moment the team tried to pull the project into a different lane: build a chain optimized for putting more data on-chain, launch mainnet in 2024, and sell the new identity as infrastructure for gaming and entertainment. That same profile tosses out performance claims—millions of transactions, fast finality, tiny fees.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about rebrands in crypto: even when they’re legitimate, they’re still trading events. They are attention events. They create confusion, deadlines, pauses, and awkward transitions where the only thing that matters is whether you’re liquid at the right moment.

Which brings us to the swap.

Officially, the TVK-to-VANRY migration was clean. Binance announced completion of the token swap and rebranding, explicitly stating a 1:1 conversion. The project’s own announcement repeated the 1:1 ratio and laid out swap details.

If you’re a rule-follower, that feels reassuring. One becomes one. No math tricks.

But the risk isn’t the ratio. The risk is everything around it.

Swaps turn the market into a narrow hallway. Some venues support the change seamlessly; others don’t. Deposits pause. Withdrawals pause. Liquidity splits. Spreads widen. People panic-transfer at the worst time, then blame themselves for being late—even when the real issue was structure, not discipline.

You can see the everyday version of that stress in public threads where users realize their platform won’t automatically support the migration and they’re told to use the official portal instead. Nothing dramatic. Just the standard crypto experience: the “right” process exists, but it’s not equally accessible to everyone, and the market doesn’t freeze while you figure it out.

This is where the mahjong analogy matters. At a real table, playing a legal hand doesn’t stop you from discarding the exact tile someone needs. In crypto, following the instructions doesn’t stop you from getting hit by illiquidity, timing, and the fact that migrations temporarily turn everything into a liquidity game.

To get a clearer picture of Vanar, I like looking at sources that aren’t trying to sell it. A UK crypto-asset risk disclosure dated October 28, 2024 describes Vanar Chain as a Layer-1 aimed at gaming, entertainment, and metaverse applications, and it names the operating company as VANRY Technology DMCC in Dubai.

More importantly, it lays out the supply structure plainly: 2.4 billion total tokens, with 50% tied to the genesis block (the swap), 41.5% allocated to validator rewards, 6.5% to development rewards, and 2% to airdrops and community incentives. It also stresses the obvious-but-necessary point that value depends on adoption, and that competition risk is real.

That supply breakdown matters because it tells you something about how the system expects to function: user fees are intended to be tiny and predictable, so security and participation are likely subsidized through rewards. That’s not automatically bad. But it does create a pressure that rule-followers regularly ignore: rewards become someone’s sell supply. If the network doesn’t generate durable demand, emissions can feel like a slow leak.

Now add the part nobody likes talking about: price history.

Market data sources show VANRY trading around fractions of a cent, with circulating supply close to the full 2.4 billion. Binance’s price page lists an all-time high around $1.2236. Put those together and you get a drawdown that’s basically the story of crypto in one statistic: about 99.5% below peak.

That number doesn’t convict anyone of anything. But it changes the psychology of the token. It changes who holds it. It changes how quickly holders sell into any rally. And it changes how the market interprets the project’s next narrative move—because after a fall like that, every new angle gets treated with suspicion, even if the work is real.

Which is why Vanar’s recent messaging choices matter.

One direction Vanar has pushed is payments. In February 2025, FF News reported a partnership between Vanar Chain and Worldpay, highlighting Worldpay’s scale—over $2.3 trillion processed annually across 146 countries—and framing the collaboration as a push toward Web3 payments.

If you’ve watched enough crypto cycles, you know the reflex response: “partnership” doesn’t necessarily mean “integration.” That skepticism is healthy. Still, it’s worth noticing why this particular partnership would be appealing to Vanar’s pitch. If you’re serious about microtransactions, you want predictable fees and fast settlement. You want the boring stuff to work.

Vanar also publicized being part of NVIDIA Inception. Again: real program, potentially useful resources, but not an audit and not a guarantee. It’s a signal, not proof.

And then there’s the newer, riskier narrative stretch: Vanar now presents itself as “AI-native,” describing an ecosystem stack with components that imply things like semantic memory and on-chain reasoning. This is where you have to be extra careful as a reader, because “AI” is the easiest story in the world to inflate in crypto. The question isn’t whether the words sound smart. The question is whether developers can ship with it, whether users touch it without being bribed, and whether any of it produces repeatable transaction flow.

So why do rule-followers keep losing?

Because they think the game is documentation.

They see “1:1 swap” and relax. They see “fixed fees” and assume demand will appear. They see a big-name partner and imagine volume. They see a program badge and assume validation.

Meanwhile, the market is watching a different scoreboard: actual usage, actual liquidity, incentive pressure, and whether the story keeps changing.

Vanar’s test is simple to say and hard to pass. Can it turn its pitch—cheap, predictable transactions for real consumer apps—into boring, undeniable usage that doesn’t depend on rebrand energy? Can it grow demand fast enough that validator rewards and ecosystem incentives don’t just become a pipeline of sell pressure? Can it make partnerships turn into transactions instead of headlines? And can it talk about “AI-native” without turning into another project that chases whatever word is hot this quarter?

Mahjong has a cruel way of teaching humility. You can learn the rules and still be the easiest player at the table to exploit.

Crypto does the same.

If Vanar succeeds, it won’t be because the documents were well written. It will be because the chain found real, repeatable demand—because people used it when nobody was watching, and kept using it when incentives weren’t dangling in front of them.

If it doesn’t, the outcome will look familiar: a project with a plausible technical story, a token with a painful chart, and a trail of careful people saying, “But I did everything right.

They probably did.

They just didn’t realize the rules were never the game.

#vanar @Vanarchain $VANRY

Peter Steinberger’s Move Signals a Bold New Chapter for Autonomous AI

By Staff Writer

February 2026

In a move that has quietly reshaped the conversation around artificial intelligence, , founder of the open-source AI project , has joined .

At first glance, it appears to be another high-profile hiring in a rapidly evolving industry. But beneath the surface, this decision reflects a deeper transformation taking place inside AI: the shift from conversational systems to autonomous agents capable of real-world digital action.

From Open Source Roots to Global AI Leadership

Steinberger built OpenClaw around a bold concept — AI systems that do more than respond. Instead of simply generating answers, agent-style AI is designed to plan tasks, use tools, and execute multi-step workflows.

OpenClaw gained recognition in developer communities for exploring how AI could:

Break complex goals into structured stepsInteract with software toolsAutomate repetitive digital processesOperate with limited supervision

Now, with Steinberger at OpenAI, those experimental ideas may be scaled into mainstream products used by millions.

Why This Hiring Matters

The Rise of AI Agents

The AI industry is moving beyond chat interfaces. The next generation of systems will likely function more like digital operators than assistants.

Instead of asking an AI to write a paragraph, users may assign it entire objectives:

Conduct market researchPrepare business summariesOrganize schedulesAnalyze datasetsCoordinate tasks across applications

Steinberger’s expertise aligns precisely with this emerging direction.

Balancing Innovation and Responsibility

Autonomous agents introduce new challenges. An AI system that can access files, execute commands, or interact with software must be built with strict safeguards.

Security concerns such as prompt injection, unintended automation, and tool misuse are becoming central issues in AI design. By bringing in someone who has worked directly on open-source agent systems, OpenAI appears to be strengthening its ability to build both capability and control into future products.

Open Source Meets Enterprise Scale

OpenClaw was built in the open. Its development reflected the fast-paced experimentation common in open-source communities.

The question now is how that spirit translates inside a major AI organization. If handled thoughtfully, the combination could produce powerful results:

Community-driven innovationEnterprise-level infrastructureGlobal deployment reach

The collaboration between open ecosystems and structured research labs may define the next decade of AI development.

A Broader Industry Shift

Steinberger’s move also reflects a larger pattern: leading AI talent gravitating toward organizations with deep research resources and computational infrastructure.

As AI development becomes more complex and capital-intensive, collaboration between independent innovators and major labs is increasingly common. This dynamic may accelerate progress — but it also raises questions about centralization in the AI industry.

What It Means for the Future

If OpenAI successfully integrates Steinberger’s vision, users could soon see AI systems that:

Manage multi-step workflows autonomouslyCoordinate tasks across digital environmentsOffer deeper productivity automationOperate with transparent action logs and permission controls

This represents a major step forward from today’s primarily conversational AI tools.

Conclusion

Peter Steinberger joining OpenAI is more than a career move. It marks a symbolic moment in the evolution of artificial intelligence.

The industry is transitioning from systems that talk to systems that act.

If this partnership succeeds, it could help define what responsible, capable AI agents look like — and how they integrate into everyday life.

The agent era is no longer theoretical. It’s being built.

#OpenClawFounderJoinsOpenAI