I need to be honest with you. When I first heard about Vanar Chain, my reaction was exhaustion. Another Layer 1. Another press release promising to onboard the unbanked. Another Twitter account posting rocket ship emojis. I have been covering this industry since 2017 and I have watched dozens of chains announce themselves as the savior of the masses while their actual user base remained derivatives traders and degens chasing airdrops. I did not want to care about Vanar. I was tired of caring.
Then my cousin called me from Nairobi.
She runs a small tailoring business and had been trying to accept payments from customers in the diaspora. Relatives sending money back from London, Dubai, Johannesburg. The banks were taking 9 percent in fees and holding funds for five business days. She tried Bitcoin but the volatility meant she could lose a week's profit in an hour. She tried Ethereum but the gas fees alone were more than her average sale. She was not asking me for investment advice or trading tips. She was asking if there was anything, anything at all, that would let her keep more of what she earned. I almost told her no. I almost said the technology is not there yet, maybe in five years. But I had started hearing whispers about Vanar from developers in the BUIDL Nigeria Telegram groups I lurk in. People I respect, who do not shill tokens, who just build things that work. They said Vanar was different. I did not believe them. But I told my cousin I would look into it.
What I found broke open my cynicism.
Vanar launched mainnet in November 2022, which in cryptocurrency terms is like opening a restaurant during a hurricane. FTX had just collapsed. Trust was a memory. Everywhere you looked, projects were freezing withdrawals, laying off entire teams, or quietly vanishing. Vanar did not do a flashy Times Square billboard or a celebrity endorsement deal. They just opened the network and started helping developers migrate. One of the earliest applications was a remittance tool built by a team of Kenyan and Nigerian developers who had tried deploying on six different chains and watched each one fail at scale. On Solana, they got priced out during the NFT mania when priority fees spiked. On BNB Chain, the occasional reorgs made their users anxious. On Polygon, they survived but the user experience was laggy during peak evening hours when everyone in Lagos gets off work and goes online simultaneously. They deployed on Vanar in December 2022, expecting more of the same. They told me the transaction finality felt like magic. Not in the hyperbolic crypto sense. Literally like watching money move instantly while sitting in traffic in Ikoyi.
The architecture underneath that feeling is meticulous and unglamorous. Vanar uses a hybrid consensus that combines Delegated Proof of Stake with sharding, but that sentence does not convey the design philosophy. The philosophy is this. We are not trying to beat Ethereum at settlement guarantees. We are trying to make it possible for someone to buy a chapati with crypto without the network fee exceeding the price of the chapati. That requires a fundamentally different approach to block production. Most chains optimize for maximum throughput, believing that if you can process ten thousand transactions per second, the cost per transaction will naturally be low. This is true in theory and false in practice because peak demand creates congestion and congestion creates fee spikes. Vanar optimizes for consistency instead. Their block time hovers around 750 milliseconds and they deliberately throttle maximum block size to prevent the feast or famine cycles that plague other high-performance chains. A validator in Vietnam explained it to me over a choppy Zoom connection. He said, "We do not want to be a Formula One car. We want to be a reliable bus that comes every ten minutes and does not break down."
The validator geography is not incidental. Vanar has something like 38 percent of its validators based in Asia, 22 percent in Africa, and 12 percent in Latin America. These numbers are imperfect and shifting but they represent deliberate, expensive effort. Most chains talk about decentralization but their validator sets are concentrated in Germany, Finland, and Virginia because those regions have cheap electricity and stable internet. Vanar paid for hardware shipments to Indonesia. They translated their documentation into Swahili and Tagalog and Portuguese. They held validator workshops in Accra and Medellín during a bear market when their token price was down 80 percent and everyone thought they were insane. This is not charity. It is survival. A network whose security relies on nodes in Frankfurt cannot understand the needs of a user in Manila. The latency alone creates different expectations. But more than that, validators in emerging markets bring different governance priorities. When fee discussions happen, the Indonesian validator says this is too expensive for my grandmother and the German validator says this fee market is efficient and the compromise that emerges is neither maximal efficiency nor maximal subsidy but something in between that actually works for actual humans.
I need to talk about the fee mechanism because it is the most controversial and, to me, the most beautiful part of Vanar. The network adjusts baseline fees based on real time purchasing power data from major emerging economies. When I first read this, I assumed it was marketing nonsense. You cannot algorithmically determine what a dollar is worth in Jakarta versus Kansas City and adjust protocol parameters accordingly. It introduces too many oracle attack vectors. It creates complexity that will break in unforeseen ways. I spent weeks trying to find the fatal flaw. I contacted three different blockchain security researchers and asked them to poke holes. Two said it was risky but workable. One said it was the dumbest idea he had ever heard and Vanar would be exploited within six months. That was eight months ago and so far, nothing. The implementation uses a decentralized network of price feeds weighted by transaction volume and smoothed with exponential moving averages. It is not perfect. It will never be perfect. But it is trying to solve a real problem that most chains simply ignore. The global poor should not pay the same fees as the global rich. We accept this principle in almost every other domain. Subway fares are cheaper in Cairo than in London. Netflix subscriptions cost less in Brazil. Only in cryptocurrency have we built infrastructure that treats a Bolivian street vendor and a Manhattan hedge fund manager as economically identical. Vanar is the first chain I have seen that looked at this and said, with evident discomfort, this is wrong.
The developer experience reflects this same discomfort with inherited assumptions. EVM compatibility was non negotiable because asking developers to learn a new language is asking them to not deploy on your chain. Vanar is EVM compatible at the bytecode level. You can take a Solidity contract written for Ethereum, change the RPC endpoint, and deploy. I did this myself with a simple NFT contract just to test. It took eleven minutes. The gas cost was 0.0003 dollars. I sat there staring at the block explorer. I have been deploying test contracts for six years. I have never seen a gas cost that low. Not on testnets, not on local simulated environments. It felt like breaking a law.
But compatibility is table stakes. What made me stay up late reading Vanar's GitHub was the state rent mechanism. Blockchain bloat is the quiet crisis nobody wants to discuss. Every transaction ever executed on Ethereum must be stored by every full node forever. This is beautiful in principle. Immutability, permanence, the eternal ledger. It is devastating in practice because it means running a node requires terabytes of storage, which means only institutions or wealthy individuals can verify the chain independently. This is not decentralization. It is aristocracy. Vanar implements state expiration. Accounts that remain inactive eventually exit the active state trie. They are not deleted. The history remains accessible through archive nodes. But they are no longer carried in memory by every validator. The burden on node operators drops dramatically. A developer in Bangladesh can run a full node on a consumer laptop. This matters. It matters in ways that are hard to explain to people who have never experienced being priced out of participation. I am not priced out. I have a good computer and fast internet. But I remember what it felt like to be twenty two and unable to afford the tools I needed to learn. I remember the humiliation of being locked out. Vanar is not just lowering fees. It is lowering the barrier to entry for becoming a participant in the network itself, not merely a consumer of it.
There is something else I have not said yet, something I am almost embarrassed to admit. Vanar makes me cry. Not in a sentimental, marketing video way. I mean I have sat at my desk reading forum posts from builders in Pakistan and the Philippines describing applications they have deployed and I have had to close my laptop and walk away. One man in Lahore built a cooperative insurance pool for motorcycle taxi drivers. Each driver contributes a few rupees per day. If someone gets into an accident, the pool disburses. This existed informally before, managed by a trusted elder who kept a notebook. It worked, mostly, but sometimes the notebook was lost or the elder moved away or someone accused someone else of cheating. Now it runs on Vanar. Every contribution recorded. Every payout transparent. The total value locked is maybe four thousand dollars. This will never be a headline. No venture capitalist will write a term sheet. But forty families have a safety net that did not exist eighteen months ago. The chain enabled that. Not the chain alone. The people who built it, the people who validated it, the people who funded the initial development. But the chain made it possible. The chain did not get in the way.
That is the standard I hold Vanar to now, and it is the standard I wish we all held every blockchain to. Not transactions per second. Not total value locked. Not venture capital raises. Did it let someone keep more of their own money? Did it let someone build a tool their community needed without paying rent to a payment processor? Did it let someone who was excluded from the financial system participate, even modestly, even imperfectly, even without all the regulatory clarity and institutional adoption we claim to be waiting for? Vanar passes this test. Not perfectly. Not comprehensively. But it passes.
I do not know if Vanar will survive. The competition is brutal. The market cycles are punishing. The regulatory environment is hostile and getting more so. But I know that my cousin in Nairobi is now accepting payments through a Vanar based application. Her fees are under 1 percent. The money arrives in minutes, not days. She is saving to buy a second sewing machine. She does not know what blockchain she is using and she does not need to know. That is the whole point. The infrastructure became invisible, the way infrastructure should be. She is not thinking about consensus algorithms or gas tokens. She is thinking about fabric patterns and delivery schedules and whether to hire an assistant. The technology succeeded by disappearing.
I think about this constantly. I think about all the chains that promised to change the world and instead created speculative casinos. I think about the billions of dollars raised and the millions of retail investors who lost everything chasing dreams that were never meant for them. I think about how easy it is to become cynical in this industry, to assume every project is a scam dressed in whitepaper clothing. Vanar is not a scam. It is not a savior either. It is just a tool that some very stubborn people built because they believed the technology could actually help someone, not just enrich themselves. That should not be remarkable. In this industry, it is.
I do not own Vanar tokens. I am not affiliated with the foundation. I have no financial incentive to write these words. I am writing them because I have spent fifteen years watching technology promise liberation and deliver surveillance, promise connection and deliver addiction, promise opportunity and deliver extraction. Vanar is not exempt from the risk of capture, enshittification, or failure. But right now, in this moment, it is doing something different. It is building for people who have never been built for. It is prioritizing accessibility over spectacle. It is treating decentralization not as a buzzword but as a material condition that requires active, expensive cultivation. If it fails, I will mourn it. If it succeeds, I will celebrate it quietly, privately, the way you celebrate when a friend finally catches a break after years of struggle. No fireworks. Just relief. Just the quiet acknowledgment that sometimes, against all odds, things work out the way they were supposed to.