Okay, so let me just say this upfront before you roll your eyes and think I’m about to shill some random Layer 1—most blockchains still don’t get it. They just don’t. It’s January 2026, we’ve had what, three hype cycles, two brutal crashes, regulators breathing down everyone’s necks, gaming tokens nuked into oblivion, and yet half the industry is still arguing about TPS like anyone outside Crypto Twitter cares. They don’t. Nobody’s mom cares about throughput. Your cousin who plays five hours of Fortnite doesn’t care about consensus models. They care if it works. If it’s fun. If it feels normal.
That’s why Vanar caught my attention.
And no, not in a “this is the next 100x moonshot bro” kind of way. I’m too old for that energy now. I’ve watched too many charts implode. What got me was the vibe. The positioning. The fact that they didn’t start by screaming “we’re the fastest chain ever built” or “we solved scalability forever.” They started with games. Entertainment. Brands. Stuff regular humans already care about.
It’s just smarter.
Look, we’ve both been around long enough to remember the play-to-earn disaster. 2021 was insane. Everyone thought slapping a token onto a mediocre game would magically create an economy. It didn’t. It created a Ponzi treadmill. You had people in developing countries grinding digital creatures not because it was fun, but because they needed the money. And when the token crashed, the whole thing collapsed. It was messy. It was ugly. It damaged trust.
Vanar feels like it studied that mess instead of pretending it didn’t happen.
Their angle with VGN, the games network, isn’t “earn first.” It’s own. Play. Trade if you want. There’s a difference. It’s subtle, but it matters. If I buy a skin in a traditional game, I don’t really own it. I’m renting it under terms I didn’t read. If the publisher shuts down the servers, that’s it. Gone. With on-chain assets, at least in theory, you’ve got persistence. That’s a real upgrade. Not hype. Not buzzwords. Just better digital property rights.
And honestly, gamers already understand digital ownership intuitively. They’ve been valuing rare items forever. Counter-Strike skins were basically proto-NFTs before NFTs had a name. The difference is custody. Transparency. Portability. That’s where blockchain actually makes sense. Not for buying pixelated rocks hoping they pump.
Actually, wait… let me back up a second.
The reason I think Vanar might have a shot is because they’re not trying to win on technical flexing alone. Every L1 claims they’re faster and cheaper than Ethereum. Cool. And then what? If you don’t have real applications baked in, you’re just infrastructure sitting there hoping developers show up. Some do. Most don’t.
Vanar flipped that. They’ve got Virtua, the metaverse side of things, and people love to dunk on the word “metaverse” now, which is fair. Meta burned billions and delivered… floating torsos. It was clunky. But that doesn’t mean virtual spaces are dead. It just means execution matters. Virtua feels more like a branded digital playground than some speculative land-grab simulator. That’s key.
Let’s be honest here, the whole “buy virtual land and wait for appreciation” narrative was ridiculous. Most of that land is still empty. Ghost towns with nice renderings. What works instead? Fandom. Collectibles tied to entertainment franchises. Interactive experiences that feel like an extension of something you already love.
If a major movie studio drops limited digital collectibles inside Virtua and fans can display them, interact with them, maybe even use them across games—that’s interesting. That’s sticky. That’s not just speculative hype. It taps into psychology that already exists.
I almost forgot to mention the brand angle, which I think is underrated. Brands want Web3 exposure, but they don’t want to touch raw crypto infrastructure. It’s risky. It’s volatile. The compliance side alone is a headache in 2026. Regulators are still inconsistent across regions, and one wrong move can spark a media storm. So if Vanar packages blockchain as a service layer under branded experiences, that lowers friction. It makes adoption less scary.
And that’s the thing most chains still don’t grasp. Mainstream users don’t want to “use blockchain.” They want to use apps. Blockchain should be invisible. Like TCP/IP. You don’t think about it when you open Instagram.
If Vanar can make VANRY transactions feel like normal in-app purchases, that’s powerful. If a gamer pays with fiat and the blockchain handles settlement quietly in the background, that’s the sweet spot. No seed phrase anxiety. No gas fee confusion. No weird wallet popups asking you to sign something you don’t understand.
Because let’s talk about that for a second. The UX across most of Web3 is still… rough. Wallet approvals. Phishing scams. Malicious smart contracts. Even experienced users get caught sometimes. You can’t onboard billions into that chaos. It has to get simpler.
Now, about VANRY itself. I’m skeptical of all tokens by default now. You kind of have to be. Token models are where dreams go to die. If emissions outpace real demand, price collapses. If staking rewards are too generous, it attracts mercenaries who dump at the first sign of weakness. We’ve seen this playbook too many times.
But if VANRY is genuinely tied to gaming transactions, marketplace trades, brand activations, and ecosystem utility—not just yield farming—then it’s anchored to activity. That’s healthier. Still volatile, sure. It’s crypto. But at least there’s a foundation.
And here’s my slightly spicy take for 2026: the next wave of Web3 won’t be driven by DeFi. It won’t. DeFi already found its ceiling for now. It’s cyclical. The real growth will come from entertainment and AI integration. That’s where eyeballs are. That’s where daily engagement happens.
Vanar weaving AI into its stack is interesting. Not in a sci-fi robot overlord way. More in a practical sense. AI-generated in-game assets verified on-chain. NPCs that adapt intelligently while assets remain player-owned. Dynamic content that doesn’t break scarcity because blockchain tracks authenticity. That combo is actually compelling.
Basically, it feels like they’re building for where culture is heading instead of where crypto was in 2021.
Do I think it’s guaranteed to succeed? No. Absolutely not. The Layer 1 graveyard is massive. Good tech doesn’t equal adoption. Strong branding doesn’t guarantee retention. And honestly, macro conditions still matter. If global liquidity tightens again or regulators overcorrect, even solid projects can struggle.
But here’s the part that keeps sticking in my head. Vanar isn’t trying to convince people to care about decentralization philosophy. It’s trying to plug into things people already enjoy—games, collectibles, digital identity—and quietly upgrade them. That’s subtle. And subtle is underrated in crypto.
It’s not loud. It’s not screaming about being the “Ethereum killer.” It’s building sideways into culture.
And maybe that’s what finally works.
