F I N K Y

Because “faster” in crypto is a suitcase word. People stuff different things into it—block cadence, confirmation speed, how quickly your swap feels “done,” how the chain behaves when it’s busy—then zip it up and pretend it’s one clean metric. The trick is that you can make almost any chain look heroic if you get to choose what goes inside the suitcase.

Fogo’s headline number usually shows up alongside another number that’s easier to grab onto: 40 milliseconds. The project and launch coverage repeatedly frame Fogo around “40ms blocks,” and then connect that to the “up to 18x faster” claim.

So, is the claim false?

Not in the simple “they made it up” sense. Fogo really does publicly anchor itself to the idea of extremely short block times, and “up to” gives them room to describe a best-case scenario without promising you’ll live in that best case every day.

But is the claim clean? Is it the kind of comparison you can take literally?

That’s where it starts to wobble.

Solana’s own developer documentation talks about slots (the rhythm at which block production happens) being configured around ~400ms, with some fluctuation. If you do the simple math most readers assume they’re being invited to do—40ms versus 400ms—you get 10x, not 18x.

So how do people end up saying 18x?

There are a few perfectly legal ways to land there without ever writing something technically “wrong.” You can compare to the slower end of Solana’s fluctuation range. You can compare a lab-like target to a real-world average. You can quietly shift the meaning of “faster” from “slot cadence” to “confirmation experience.” Or you can just let the “up to” do its job: it signals a maximum, not a typical outcome.

That’s why the claim spreads so well. It’s not pinned to one measurement method, so it’s hard to pin down and disprove.

The more interesting part is how Fogo is trying to make 40ms plausible in the first place.

Most chains run into a boring, unavoidable limit: distance. Consensus is messages flying between validators, and messages have to travel through fiber across continents. You can write the fastest software in the world and still lose to physics if your key nodes are far apart.

Fogo doesn’t pretend that problem doesn’t exist. It leans into a solution that’s blunt: keep consensus-critical validators close to each other.

In Fogo’s architecture materials, validators are grouped into geographic “zones,” and the ideal version of a zone is described as a single data center—close enough that network latency is tiny and predictable. The whole point is to get consensus messages moving fast enough that sub-100ms blocks aren’t a fantasy.

That’s the part most “18x” quotes don’t mention. Fogo isn’t saying “we beat Solana while playing the same game on the same field.” It’s trying to win by shrinking the field.

And that changes what the comparison really means.

If a chain gets low latency by encouraging co-location and tighter operational constraints, you’re not just comparing software quality. You’re comparing tradeoffs.

It’s like comparing two delivery services where one says, “We’re 10x faster,” and then you realize their drivers only operate inside one neighborhood while the other one covers the entire city. The speed can be real. The comparison can still be misleading.

There’s another reason “40ms blocks” doesn’t automatically translate into “you feel 18x faster.”

Users don’t experience block intervals directly. Users experience:

how quickly their transaction gets picked up,whether it gets dropped or delayed under load,how many confirmations they wait before they relax,whether the infrastructure they’re using (RPCs, relayers, validators) becomes the bottleneck.

A chain can print tiny block intervals and still give you a mediocre experience if the network is congested or the transaction path is messy. That’s why serious Solana infrastructure discussions focus on things like confirmation/commitment behavior, not just slot timing.

And Fogo is early enough that the hardest test—stress, volatility spikes, adversarial traffic—hasn’t had years to write the chain’s real reputation yet.

Even in early mainnet coverage, you can see the gap between “block time” and “what’s actually happening on-chain.” Reporting around launch mentioned 40ms blocks, but also cited throughput numbers for early apps that are solid yet nowhere near the kind of “blow everything away” mental image casual readers attach to the slogan.

So here’s the most human, non-hype answer:

If someone hears “18x faster than Solana” and imagines a simple promise—every action you take will settle eighteen times quicker than it does on Solana, under the same conditions, for everyone worldwide—that’s not a fair interpretation. The claim isn’t defined tightly enough for that, and the underlying design choices (zones, co-location, operational constraints) mean it’s not an apples-to-apples race anyway.

If you interpret the claim the way the fine print wants you to—in the best case, with a topology designed around low-latency zones, we can run block intervals far shorter than Solana’s nominal slot cadence—then it’s not inherently false. It’s just narrower than the slogan sounds.

What would actually settle this, in a way that’s worth trusting?

Not more tweets. Not more multipliers.

You’d want to see real, boring evidence over time: does Fogo keep those low block intervals during heavy usage? Does inclusion latency stay tight when blocks fill up? Are reorgs rare and clearly communicated? Do zones expand in a way that doesn’t quietly turn “decentralization” into a small club of co-located operators?

#fogo @Fogo Official $FOGO

When I went looking for Vanar, I expected the usual trail: a token page, a couple of glossy diagrams, maybe a whitepaper that reads like it was written for nobody in particular. What I didn’t expect was how quickly it turns into a very ordinary, very human story about friction—how projects change names, move tokens, publish new promises, and then spend months dealing with the unromantic consequences.

The first solid thing you can grab isn’t a slogan. It’s a set of network parameters. Vanar’s docs tell you exactly how to connect: Chain ID 2040, a public RPC endpoint, a websocket endpoint, and the official explorer. If you’ve ever onboarded a new EVM network, the steps feel familiar—copy, paste, connect, hope the RPC doesn’t time out. (docs.vanarchain.com)

That matters because it separates two categories of crypto projects: the ones that exist mainly as narratives, and the ones that at least have working plumbing. Vanar’s chain is live. There’s an explorer. Blocks tick up. Transactions are there to be inspected. (explorer.vanarchain.com)

And then you see the numbers, and they’re… confrontational. Nearly 194 million transactions. Around 28.6 million wallet addresses. Close to 8.94 million blocks. Those totals aren’t subtle. They’re the sort of figures that make you pause, because you can’t tell at a glance whether you’re looking at genuine scale or a very efficient machine generating activity. Both are possible. The explorer confirms volume; it doesn’t automatically explain the nature of that volume. (explorer.vanarchain.com)

At this point, most projects try to pull you back into the pitch: “AI,” “infrastructure,” “stack,” “future.” Vanar does that too, but if you keep poking around, the tone shifts. You start running into the project’s older life.

Vanar didn’t start as Vanar.

In late 2023, the team announced a clean token migration: TVK becomes VANRY, one-to-one. No complicated ratios. No “rebasing.” Just a swap. It’s written plainly in Vanar’s own announcement. (vanarchain.com) The swap portal repeats the same message, because portals like that exist for one reason: reduce the chance of confusion turning into anger. (swap.vanarchain.com)

If you’ve watched enough of these migrations, you know the emotional arc. A token swap looks tidy in a blog post. In the real world it creates a long tail of problems: people who missed deadlines, people holding tokens in places that don’t support the swap, people who swear they did everything right and still ended up stuck.

That last category is why the story doesn’t stay inside official channels. You can find users on public forums describing confusion around the TVK→VANRY process and trying to troubleshoot what went wrong. It’s not a smoking gun; it’s more like the sound of a support queue spilling out into the open. (reddit.com)

That kind of friction is the opposite of what crypto likes to market. But it’s the part that tells you the most about a project’s maturity. Anyone can write a new roadmap. Not everyone can handle the messy cleanup when users show up late, confused, and suspicious.

So what did Vanar become after the migration?

This is where the story splits into two voices: the marketing voice and the engineering voice.

The marketing voice is about a layered system—Vanar presents itself as an AI-oriented platform with multiple components stacked above the base chain, with language around semantic memory and reasoning modules. (vanarchain.com) The subtext is clear: this isn’t just “another chain,” it’s supposed to be a place where more complex applications can live.

The engineering voice, though, is quieter and more revealing. On GitHub, Vanar’s blockchain client is described as EVM-compatible and explicitly a fork of Geth—Ethereum’s widely used Go client. (github.com)

That one detail changes how you should interpret everything else.

A Geth fork is not a flex. It’s a decision. It’s the project saying: we’re not reinventing the execution model from scratch; we’re taking something proven and modifying it. That can be smart. It also means the core reality of the chain is going to feel Ethereum-shaped: accounts, gas, transactions, familiar tooling—unless the team has gone out of its way to alter fundamentals.

Vanar’s own docs lean into that pragmatism. They make the case for EVM compatibility as a practical choice, not a philosophical one. (docs.vanarchain.com)

So where does the “AI chain” idea fit?

Here’s the honest version: when crypto projects say “AI-native,” they’re often describing one of two things.

Either they’re putting AI compute off-chain and using the chain to anchor results—proofs, attestations, hashes, state commitments.

Or they’re using “AI” to describe developer tooling and services layered above the chain—SDKs, data systems, orchestration frameworks—things that might be valuable, but aren’t “the blockchain thinking.”

Vanar’s public materials talk about richer data and more structured storage “onchain,” even positioning itself as an alternative to relying on external file layers. (vanarchain.com) That’s a strong claim. Strong claims have a predictable problem: the moment you bring them into a serious review, somebody asks what the chain actually stores, how quickly state grows, who pays for it, and what it does to validator requirements over time.

Those aren’t gotcha questions. They’re basic survival questions.

And they’re the reason so many “bigger than a chain” narratives stall out. Not because the vision is wrong, but because the proof is either unclear, or it lives in proprietary components that can’t be independently evaluated.

The token side of the story is more concrete, but it has its own awkward edges.

Vanar’s whitepaper states a maximum supply of 2.4 billion VANRY, with an initial supply tied to the swap and additional issuance via block rewards until the cap is reached. (cdn.vanarchain.com) Market trackers repeat the cap figure; CoinMarketCap lists a 2.4B max supply, and shows circulating supply near 2.29B at the time of access. (coinmarketcap.com) CoinGecko likewise lists 2.4B. (coingecko.com)

That consistency is good. But it also implies something that isn’t usually said out loud: if most of the cap is already circulating, future “tokenomics excitement” is limited. You don’t get to keep telling the market “wait until supply unlocks” or “wait until emissions start” when the supply story is already largely written.

So the project has to win on something else: actual usage, real developer adoption, applications that generate fees and make staking feel like something other than ceremonial.

Which brings us back to the explorer numbers—the nearly 194 million transactions and 28.6 million addresses. (explorer.vanarchain.com)

Those stats can be read two ways:

If they’re organic, Vanar has traction most mid-tier networks would envy.

If they’re inflated by incentives or automation, they’re a warning sign: the chain can look busy without producing lasting demand.

The uncomfortable truth is you can’t settle that debate with a press release. You settle it by watching patterns: fees, contract activity, repeat users, application diversity, and whether usage persists when nobody’s being paid to click buttons.

That’s why Vanar, to me, reads less like a fairy tale about AI and more like a project trying to push an idea through an unforgiving filter.

The idea is simple to say: blockchains should host more of what applications actually need data, workflows, logic—without falling apart.

The filter is harsh: cost, state growth, decentralization pressures, reliability, developer experience, and the endless reality of migrations and support.

Vanar has cleared one bar that matters: it shipped a live network with public endpoints, a chain ID, and enough on-chain history to be examined. (docs.vanarchain.com) It also carries the baggage that shipped projects carry: token swaps, confused holders, and a past identity that doesn’t disappear just because the logo changed. (vanarchain.com)

If you want a neat conclusion—“it will succeed” or “it will fail”—you won’t get one honestly. What you can say, without pretending, is this:

Vanar is real enough to be judged on execution rather than imagination. And the part of its story that still hasn’t fully proven itself is the part it talks about the most: whether the “AI stack” is a measurable, defensible capability—or a collection of branded layers that sound better than they audit.

#vanar @Vanarchain $VANRY

Kad es pirmo reizi noskatījos, kā Fogo veic savu darbu, iestatījums bija gandrīz garlaicīgs. Komandai bija programma, par kuru viņi bija pārliecināti, ka tā ir “pietiekami paralēla.” Viņi nebija naivi—viņi zināja, ka SVM modelis tikai veic darījumus blakus, kad rakstīšanas kopas nepārklājas. Tomēr viņi pieņēma, ka ir veikuši acīmredzamo darbu: sadalījuši stāvokli, izvairījušies no acīmredzamām sastrēgumiem, saglabājuši karstos ceļus slaidus.

Tad viņi pagrieza pogu.
Zemā slodze, viss izskatījās tīrs. Zem lielāka satiksmes apjoma tas sāka viņiem melot—sākumā klusi. Izeja pieauga, tad sasniedza griestus, kas neatbilda tam, ko aparatūra būtu spējusi darīt. Aizkave nepacēlās pakāpeniski; tā pēkšņi uzlēca straujos uzplūdumos un tad atkal nokrita kā nekas nebūtu noticis. Programa nesabruka. Tā vienkārši uzvedās kā vienas joslas ceļš, kas izlikās par šoseju.