Low fees are not the breakthrough predictable costs are.Most people miss it because they price chains like commodities instead of budgeting them like infrastructure.For builders and users, it changes the difference between “it worked yesterday” and “it can be relied on every day.”
I’ve watched enough consumer-grade apps wobble under fee spikes to stop caring about the lowest number on a quiet day. What breaks teams isn’t paying a little more; it’s not being able to forecast what “a login,” “a trade,” or “a claim” costs when usage surges. Over time you start treating fee variance as a product risk, not a network detail.
The concrete friction is simple: if your onchain action has an unpredictable marginal cost, you can’t set stable pricing, you can’t subsidize users safely, and you can’t promise a consistent UX. Auction-style fee markets turn high demand into a bidding war, and the bidding war turns into surprise invoices. The result is a weird loop where teams either overbuild offchain escape hatches, or they stop offering onchain features the moment they get popular.
It’s like trying to run a café where the rent changes every time more customers walk in.
Vanar’s bet is to treat transaction pricing as an engineered control system rather than a live auction. The core idea is a fixed-fee model expressed in dollar terms, so the user experience targets “this action costs roughly X” even if the gas token price moves. In the whitepaper, the network describes fixed fee brackets and a first-come, first-served ordering model instead of “highest bidder wins,” specifically because the fee is meant to be stable and the queue is meant to be fair. The same document explains how that stability is maintained: a protocol-level price input is computed from on-chain and off-chain sources and then used to adjust the internal conversion so the effective fee tracks the intended dollar amount.
Mechanically, this still lives in a familiar account-based, EVM-compatible state model: contracts update shared state, transactions are signed, broadcast, executed, and the resulting state transition is validated by the network. What changes is the verification checklist around inclusion and payment. Instead of validators prioritizing the highest gas price, they can prioritize by arrival and validity because the fee isn’t a variable users fight over; it’s a parameter the chain enforces. Congestion doesn’t automatically translate into fee explosions; it translates into a longer queue and stricter capacity discipline. That can be a better trade for consumer apps: slow is visible, surprise is corrosive.
The incentive design then has to reinforce honest execution under this pricing regime. Validators still earn from producing blocks and validating transactions, and the system ties participation to staking and delegation so token holders can back validators and share rewards, aligning “who gets paid” with “who behaves.” Vanar also frames validator onboarding through reputation and community involvement, which is effectively another filter on who is allowed to run critical infrastructure. The failure modes are where the real trade appears: if your cost predictability depends on a price input, you inherit oracle-style risks (bad data, lag, manipulation pressure, or governance capture around who controls updates). And if demand overwhelms throughput, predictability doesn’t eliminate bottlenecks; it just changes the symptom from price spikes to delayed inclusion. The design explicitly discusses tiering fees by transaction size to make “block space abuse” expensive, which is a practical defense, not a guarantee.
Fees are paid in the native token as gas, staking/delegation is the mechanism that aligns validators and token holders around correct verification, and governance is how parameters (including validator selection and protocol changes) get tuned over time.
If the pricing control loop or its governance is stressed by adversarial behavior or concentrated decision-making, the “predictable cost” promise can degrade in messy, real-world ways.
If you were building a consumer app today, would you rather explain a fee spike to users—or explain a short queue?
