My first reaction to Vanar was the same reaction I have to most L1s. Faster blocks, cleaner branding, a whitepaper full of conviction. I filed it away and moved on.
Then I noticed something that made me look again.
They’re Not Talking to Crypto People
Vanar keeps showing up in conversations about gaming, entertainment, and digital IP. Not in the typical “we’re bringing NFTs to gaming” way that made everyone cringe in 2022. More like they’re quietly positioning Web3 as infrastructure that users never need to think about.
Virtua, VGN, the entertainment brand partnerships. None of that is aimed at people who already have MetaMask installed. It’s aimed at people who just want to play something or collect something they actually care about.
The Part That Still Bothers Me
Gaming and entertainment are genuinely brutal industries. Taste shifts fast. What feels culturally relevant today gets ignored in eighteen months. Vanar’s entire thesis depends on these products staying fun and sticky, not just technically functional.
That’s execution risk I can’t hand-wave away. Technical infrastructure is the easy part. Keeping users engaged with entertainment products long enough to onboard them into Web3 is a completely different challenge.
Why I Eventually Came Around
The next wave of mainstream crypto users won’t arrive because they read a litepaper. They’ll arrive because something they already enjoy, a game, a digital collectible, a piece of entertainment IP, happened to run on a blockchain underneath.
Vanar is betting on being that underneath layer. After watching this space long enough, I think that’s actually a smarter wedge than building another chain that tries to attract people who are already here.
$VANRY isn’t a bet on crypto adoption. It’s a bet on whether normal people can be brought in through things they already love. That framing took me a while to see. Now I can’t unsee it.
