F I N K Y

On paper, it was tidy. One TVK became one VANRY. No sliding scale, no “bonus window,” no complicated math—just a portal, a ratio, and a new ticker. The official announcement spells that out in plain language, and the swap site repeats it like a refrain.

That kind of clean conversion usually signals a branding reset. In Vanar’s case, it also signals something else: the project was quietly stepping away from the safety of being “a token” and into the much harsher job of being “a chain.” Tokens can drift on narratives for a long time. Chains don’t get that luxury. Chains have to keep producing blocks, keep fees predictable enough for people to build products, and keep the whole machine patched when upstream software vulnerabilities hit.

You can see the telltale signs in the places retail traders rarely look. Vanar’s own developer documentation publishes the sort of details you only bother to publish when you expect developers to plug in: a public RPC endpoint, a websocket, a chain ID, and a block explorer that isn’t someone else’s. If you cross-check outside Vanar’s own docs, Chainlist and chainid.network also list Vanar Mainnet as chain ID 2040, with the same explorer endpoint. That consistency matters. It’s mundane, but infrastructure lives and dies on the mundane.

The deeper question is why Vanar felt it needed to do this at all. A project doesn’t adopt the burden of mainnet operations because it’s fun. It does it because it believes the old container—an ERC-20 token with partnerships and a narrative—won’t carry it to whatever “adoption” is supposed to look like. The story Vanar is trying to tell now is not primarily about collectibles or entertainment. It’s about dependability: faster blocks, cheaper transactions, predictable behavior, and a stack designed to handle data without falling apart.

And yet, right when the project starts sounding like infrastructure, it also makes a choice that reveals what it values most: control early, decentralization later.

Vanar’s own documentation describes “Proof of Reputation” as a way to decide validator eligibility based on credibility and trust rather than stake or compute. The whitepaper goes further and frames the network’s path as something like a guided transition—starting in a Proof-of-Authority mode and onboarding validators over time through reputation and community processes.

That is not an accident of phrasing. It’s a governance posture.

Proof-of-Authority is how you get a chain to behave on day one. It is also how you keep a small group in charge of block production, upgrades, and—if it comes to it—who gets to transact under pressure. Some projects hide this behind vague language. Vanar is relatively direct about it. If you’re building for brands, consumer apps, or enterprise partners who will quit at the first serious outage, PoA is an attractive starting point. If you’re building for people who treat decentralization as the whole point, it’s a red flag. Vanar’s bet seems to be that the first group is larger than the second, at least for the kind of “real world” use cases it wants.

Then there’s the technical base layer, where Vanar again looks less interested in novelty and more interested in compatibility. The project positions itself as EVM-friendly, and third-party tooling pages also describe it that way. Compatibility is a good way to reduce friction, but it also means inheriting a lot of history.

That inheritance becomes concrete in a May 2024 security audit published by Beosin. Buried in the audit isn’t just a checklist of issues—it explicitly describes Vanar as a fork of Go-Ethereum (Geth) and warns, in effect, that forking a major client isn’t a one-time job. You’re signing up for a never-ending patch cycle, because new weaknesses in upstream ecosystems don’t stop appearing just because your marketing team has moved on.

What caught my attention more than the “fork” detail, though, was the way Vanar appears to handle fees.

If you’re trying to onboard businesses or consumer apps, fee predictability matters more than ideology. A designer building payments into a game economy doesn’t want to explain to users why the cost of a simple action spiked because the fee market got weird.

Beosin’s audit describes a mechanism where, under certain chain IDs, the network fetches fee-per-transaction information from a fixed external URL every 100 blocks and syncs it onchain.

That design choice reads like an engineer trying to solve a practical problem. It also reads like an auditor highlighting a governance and dependency problem. An external URL is not a neutral force of nature. Someone controls it. Someone maintains it. Someone decides what it returns. Even if the system is run responsibly, it introduces a non-trivial question: if the network’s cost model can be influenced by an offchain endpoint, what stops that endpoint from becoming a quiet lever of power?

The important nuance here is that “offchain dependency” isn’t automatically bad. Plenty of production systems depend on external components. But blockchains sell themselves—often implicitly—as systems that minimize how much trust you have to place in any single operator. When you build a direct bridge between an external endpoint and a core economic parameter, you need unusually strong transparency around governance, change control, and failure modes. Vanar’s public-facing pages focus on the promise of stability. The audit makes you think about the control surface behind that stability.

On the token side, Vanar’s own messaging tends to keep things clean and user-friendly. CoinMarketCap’s profile page repeats the simple rebrand story: TVK became VANRY through a 1:1 swap. A separate exchange support notice from late 2023 also confirms the same ratio and notes that TVK deposits/withdrawals were no longer supported after the swap. The agreement across sources is useful: it reduces the chance that the swap itself is a murky event. It doesn’t tell you whether the larger strategic pivot succeeded, but it tells you the basic migration story isn’t being rewritten depending on where you read it.

Where Vanar tries to differentiate now is with the “AI-native” stack—especially Neutron and Kayon.

Neutron’s marketing page makes a bold claim about turning large data into tiny “seeds,” positioning it as a way to store and move information efficiently. But the more grounded description appears in Vanar’s documentation, where Neutron is framed as a system for handling data with a hybrid approach—performance and flexibility via offchain storage, with onchain anchoring for integrity and verification. That’s a far more believable architecture than “everything fully onchain,” and it hints at something important: Vanar, for all the AI-forward language, seems to know the limits of what blockchains are good at when real file sizes enter the room.

Kayon is the harder piece to judge because it lives closer to claims than to verifiable mechanics. The pitch leans into reasoning, compliance, and jurisdictional complexity—areas where it’s easy to write convincing copy and much harder to ship something that stands up to scrutiny. If Kayon is meant to help real businesses, the test won’t be how fluent it sounds. The test will be whether it can be audited: what data it uses, how rules change, who is accountable when outputs are wrong, and how those outputs interact with financial settlement.

Stepping back, the picture that emerges is not a fairy tale and not a simple scam narrative either. It’s something more common and more uncomfortable: a project trying to graduate from “token world” into “systems world,” making trade-offs along the way that will please some audiences and alienate others.

Vanar’s strongest argument is not speed or branding; it’s that it’s trying to make the user experience predictable—fast blocks, explicit network details, and fee behavior that appears designed to avoid chaos. Its weakest point is that the same machinery that can produce predictability—permissioned validators early on, external influence over fee data—also creates questions about how much of the system you’re really trusting to a small set of operators.

If you’re trying to judge whether Vanar can support “real world adoption,” the most useful indicators won’t be slogans. They’ll be operational signals: how transparent the validator set becomes over time, how changes to fee mechanisms are governed, how quickly client software is patched when new issues appear upstream, and whether real applications choose the chain because it solves a specific problem rather than because incentives temporarily made it cheap to experiment.

#vanar @Vanarchain $VANRY