For a while, I also got distracted by the big TVL numbers on chains like . When you see billions locked and constant growth charts, it feels like real adoption is happening. But after actually building a real product and stripping away all the shiny dashboards, my perspective changed — especially when I compared it with .
Recently I’ve been working with a traditional clothing brand. Their idea was simple: customers buy physical clothes, scan a QR code, and receive a digital reward on-chain. That’s it. No seed phrases. No “install MetaMask.” No buying ETH just to pay gas. If a normal customer feels confused at any step, the system fails.
At first, Base looked like the safest choice. Strong backing, clean documentation, solid ecosystem. Everything looked smooth during early testing. But once we implemented the full account abstraction flow, things became complicated fast. On paper, it’s elegant. In reality, the front-end logic became heavy. Wallet compatibility, signature prompts, environment issues — small crypto-native details that regular users would never understand.
It wasn’t broken. It just wasn’t invisible enough.
Out of curiosity, I went back to Vanar’s documentation. I had saved it months ago but never took it seriously. I assumed it was another chain trying to market itself with buzzwords. But when I followed their SDK step by step, something felt different.
They weren’t trying to impress crypto traders. They were clearly thinking about Web2 companies.
The biggest difference I felt was cost stability. On most public chains, gas fees move with market hype. A meme coin trend can suddenly make transactions expensive. That kind of unpredictability might be normal in crypto circles, but no serious company can build a customer rewards system on top of that. A CFO cannot explain to management why operating costs tripled because of market speculation.
With Vanar, the fee structure felt boring — in a good way. Predictable. Controlled. When I built a basic email-based login system, it automatically generated a smart contract wallet in the background. Users didn’t see signature popups. They didn’t need to understand what chain they were on. It felt closer to integrating a cloud service than deploying a blockchain product.
That simplicity was honestly surprising.
But nothing comes without trade-offs.
When I stress-tested their RPC and deployed contracts under heavier load, I could sense that the network is still relatively controlled and concentrated. It doesn’t have that wild, fully permissionless feeling you get from ecosystems like or . It feels more structured, less chaotic. Some developers might not like that. Traders definitely won’t find it exciting.
There’s no massive liquidity farming. No degen playground. No endless meme launches. If someone judges a chain purely by hype and TVL, they’ll probably ignore it.
But here’s what I realized.
TVL can be boosted with incentives. It can rise fast and disappear just as fast. Real adoption is different. Real adoption is when a normal customer scans a QR code on a T-shirt and doesn’t even realize they just used blockchain technology.
After building on both sides, I stopped thinking about which chain “looks bigger.” I started thinking about which one makes it easier for real businesses to quietly integrate blockchain without scaring their users.
One model is built for speculation and liquidity.
The other seems built for predictable, long-term commercial use.
Whether that approach wins or not is still unknown. But once you look beyond the surface numbers, you realize they’re playing completely different games.