Jack Bullish

When I try to understand Vanar, I don’t start with the usual “how fast is it?” questions. I start with a simpler one: would a normal person ever notice it’s a blockchain? Because if the goal is real-world adoption—games, entertainment, brands—the chain can’t behave like a science project. It has to behave like plumbing.
The most “consumer-software” decision Vanar makes is the one most chains avoid: it tries to turn gas from an auction into something closer to a posted price tag. Vanar’s docs describe a fixed-fee model meant to keep transaction costs stable (they explicitly anchor it around a $0.0005 end-user fee in fiat terms). That sounds like a small detail until you imagine a game studio trying to price in-game actions or a brand team budgeting a campaign. “Sometimes it’s $0.01, sometimes it’s $3” isn’t a fee model—it’s a customer support problem.
But here’s the part people skip: fixed fees don’t magically happen. Vanar’s own documentation says the protocol keeps that $0.0005 target by updating pricing at the protocol level using VANRY’s market price, validated across multiple sources (DEXs, CEXs, and data providers like CoinGecko/CoinMarketCap/Binance are named). So Vanar is basically choosing predictability over purity. That can be a smart trade for consumer adoption, but it also means the “price feed layer” becomes important infrastructure that deserves scrutiny, not blind trust.
They’ve clearly thought about abuse cases too. One of the more grounded sections in their docs explains why they need different fee tiers: if every transaction were always $0.0005, someone could spam large, block-filling transactions for absurdly cheap. I like seeing that kind of reasoning because it’s not hype—it’s a real operational constraint.
Then there’s the on-chain footprint, which is where I try to keep myself honest. As of Feb 6, 2026 (your timezone Asia/Karachi), Vanar’s explorer homepage showed 193,823,272 total transactions and 28,634,064 wallet addresses (plus 8,940,150 blocks). I’m not going to pretend totals are perfect proof of adoption—every chain has ways to inflate surface-level numbers—but the shape is interesting. When wallets massively outnumber “meaningful activity per wallet,” that often points to onboarding patterns where addresses are created seamlessly inside apps (which is exactly what you’d expect from a chain aiming at games and mainstream products).
Where Vanar feels most “it might actually matter” is how it ties the chain to products people could use for non-crypto reasons. Virtua’s site describes Bazaa as a marketplace “built on the Vanar blockchain,” with the pitch centered on dynamic NFTs and ownership across games/experiences. Whether you’re bullish on metaverse stuff or not, marketplaces are a good stress test: they force repetitive user actions where fee predictability and reliability matter more than ideology.
The AI angle is where I’m most skeptical by default—because everyone says “AI” now—but Vanar is at least trying to make it behave like a habit loop, not a slogan. myNeutron’s own homepage spells out “Seeds on-chain/month” even on the free tier, and it’s openly running “limited time” pricing through March 31, 2026. That tells me it’s being treated like a living product with a business model, not just a demo to decorate a roadmap.
And Vanar does something I wish more projects did: it makes token utility feel tangible instead of philosophical. Their VANRY documentation frames the token as more than “just gas”—it’s positioned for utility, governance, and network participation.

Meanwhile, Vanar’s fixed-fee system explicitly depends on VANRY price updates to keep the end-user fee stable, which makes VANRY part of the UX promise, not just a ticker.
If you zoom out, though, the biggest “adult question” isn’t fees or AI. It’s governance and validator control—because consumer systems can start centralized for reliability, but they can’t stay that way forever if they want to be credible infrastructure. Vanar’s staking docs say the network uses a DPoS-style staking approach, but with a twist: the Vanar Foundation selects validators, while the community stakes VANRY to them. Their consensus docs (and the whitepaper) describe a hybrid model: Proof of Authority governed by Proof of Reputation, with the foundation initially running validator nodes and onboarding external validators via a reputation mechanism. That’s pragmatic—and also the exact area I’d keep under a microscope. “Foundation-run at first” is fine. “Foundation-run forever” is a different story.
On the “recent developments” side, I don’t just look at tweets—I look at where the team seems to be hiring or focusing. Vanar published a blog post dated Dec 8, 2025 announcing Saiprasad Raut as Head of Payments Infrastructure. Titles don’t guarantee execution, but they do reveal intent: Vanar is positioning itself for PayFi/RWA-style use cases (which also happens to be the exact domain where fixed fees and predictable UX stop being nice-to-haves and become table stakes).
And just to anchor some history (because markets care about it even when builders don’t): the TVK → VANRY shift was widely documented. Binance’s support announcement states the swap and rebranding were completed at a 1 TVK = 1 VANRY ratio. CoinMarketCap echoes that same 1:1 swap context on the Vanar page. If you care about interoperability and verification, Etherscan lists the VANRY ERC-20 contract address (0x8de5…8624).
So here’s my “human” takeaway: Vanar looks like it’s trying to be the chain that doesn’t make you feel like you’re “using crypto.” Fixed fees are how you avoid the anxiety. Products like Virtua and myNeutron are how you create reasons to show up that aren’t “number goes up.” VANRY’s role becomes less like a badge and more like a utility token that sits under the hood of that whole experience (fees, staking, and the system that keeps fees predictable).
If I were tracking whether this is working, I’d ignore the loud stuff and watch three quiet things instead: whether those millions of wallets translate into repeat behavior (not just one-off address creation), whether validator onboarding meaningfully broadens beyond foundation selection over time, and whether the AI “Seeds” idea becomes something developers genuinely build around instead of something that just looks good on a landing page.

#vanar $VANRY @Vanar
#Vanar

Stablecoins have this funny split personality right now. On paper they’re “crypto,” but in real life they behave more like a boring utility: people use them to move value, park cash, settle invoices, and route payments when banks are slow, expensive, or simply not available. The size of that “boring utility” is already big—CoinGecko shows stablecoins around a $307B market cap today. And the throughput story is even louder: Bloomberg Law (citing Artemis Analytics) put 2025 stablecoin transaction value at $33T.
Here’s the thing though: most blockchains still make stablecoin users behave like hobbyists. You want to send $20 in USDT? Cool—first go buy a separate token so you can pay a fee, then wait long enough that the recipient starts asking “did it go through?” The chain doesn’t care that you were trying to do the simplest, most common action in payments: send money.
Plasma feels like someone finally admitted that stablecoins aren’t “an app” anymore—they’re the main event—and then rebuilt the user flow around that admission.
The clearest example is the one people will argue about the most: gasless USD₮ transfers. Plasma documents an API-managed relayer setup that sponsors gas for USDT0 transfers, but it’s intentionally narrow: it covers only direct stablecoin transfers, not arbitrary contract calls, and it’s wrapped in verification/rate-limiting and identity-aware controls to reduce abuse. If you’ve ever helped a non-crypto person make their first onchain transfer, you know why this matters. The problem isn’t “they don’t understand blockchains.” The problem is the moment they learn they need two assets to use one asset. Plasma is basically trying to delete that moment for the most common stablecoin action.
If that were the only trick, I’d shrug and say “nice UX layer.” But Plasma’s more interesting move is what it tries to do next: make stablecoins the default way you pay for everything on the chain.
They call it “custom gas tokens,” and the mechanics are refreshingly literal. A user picks an approved token like USD₮ (or BTC), the paymaster prices the gas using oracle rates, covers the gas in XPL, and then deducts the stablecoin amount from the user. In human terms: you pay the toll in dollars, and the system handles the “coins for the toll booth” behind the counter.
That sounds small until you connect it to distribution. Stablecoins are already what many users hold. If fees can be paid in the same thing people store value in, you reduce friction for wallets, merchants, payroll tools, and payment apps. It also makes “stablecoin settlement” feel less like a crypto ritual and more like… money.
But there’s a tradeoff that doesn’t get talked about enough: once you make the protocol itself responsible for gas sponsorship and fee abstraction, you’ve introduced a control plane. Someone has to run that paymaster/relayer infrastructure, set limits, decide eligibility boundaries, and keep the whole thing from being drained by bots. Plasma’s docs are honest that the paymaster is funded and controlled in a way that’s observable and constrained, and that the sponsorship happens at execution time (not reimbursed later). That’s good engineering hygiene. It’s also a reminder that “gasless” is never magic—it’s a policy plus an operations problem.
Now, if Plasma were doing all this on some weird custom VM, I’d worry it would turn into an island. Instead, it leans hard into full EVM compatibility and familiar tooling. Plasma’s execution layer is built on Reth (an Ethereum execution client in Rust), with the explicit promise that existing Ethereum contracts can be deployed without changes. That’s not just developer convenience. In payments, it’s a credibility move: you want auditors, wallet vendors, and infrastructure providers to be able to treat your chain like a slightly different Ethereum environment, not a brand-new thing they need to learn and re-risk from scratch.
Consensus is where Plasma is clearly optimizing for “payments feel.” Their docs describe PlasmaBFT as a pipelined implementation of Fast HotStuff, tuned for faster commit paths and lower latency. That reads like an academic detail until you translate it into the user experience: when someone taps “send,” they want finality to feel instant and definite, not “pending unless the chain gets busy.”
What surprised me most is their stance on slashing. Plasma explicitly avoids stake slashing and uses reward slashing instead—validators can lose rewards for misbehavior or non-participation, but not their staked capital—because unexpected capital loss is “not acceptable in institutional contexts.” I don’t think that automatically makes the network safer or risk-free, but it does signal what kind of validator set Plasma is trying to attract: operators who think like infrastructure providers, not adrenaline-seeking yield hunters.
The “is anyone actually using it?” question is where I always go next, because stablecoin settlement chains can look great in docs and dead in practice. Plasmascan’s own stats show a chain that’s already processing real volume: about 149.12M total transactions, 3,502,592 total addresses, and 417,100 transactions in the last 24 hours, plus over 529,855 contracts deployed. The explorer also shows ~1.00s block time on the latest block readout. None of this proves “payments” specifically (activity can be bots, airdrop behavior, or contract churn), but it does prove something more basic: the chain is beyond the “empty mall” phase. At this scale, performance under load, indexing, RPC stability, and ops discipline stop being theoretical.
On the stablecoin footprint, the USDT0 token page on Plasmascan shows roughly 184,394 holders and a max total supply around 1,490,554,792 USDT0 (as displayed there). Again, holder counts are messy signals, but if Plasma’s whole thesis is “stablecoin-first,” it’s meaningful that the flagship stablecoin token has a six-figure holder number on the chain’s primary explorer view.
Where does XPL fit into all this, if users can live in stablecoins? This is where Plasma’s design gets a bit like an airport: passengers pay in the currency they understand, but the airport still has its internal accounting system.
Plasma’s tokenomics describe validator rewards beginning at 5% annual inflation, decreasing by 0.5% per year down to a 3% baseline, and only activating when external validators and stake delegation go live. They also follow an EIP-1559-style approach where base fees are permanently burned, explicitly framed as a counterbalance to long-term dilution as usage grows. The way I read this is: XPL remains the “security and incentives layer,” while stablecoins become the “user layer.” If custom gas tokens work as intended, users may barely notice XPL—yet the network still uses it to settle the economics underneath.
One practical signal that Plasma is thinking about real-world deployment (not just whiteboard design) is how the docs talk to node operators. Their upgrade guidance basically assumes frequent releases, and it lists examples like “zero-fee USD₮ transfer enhancements,” “custom gas token support,” and “wallet and exchange integration improvements,” alongside performance work like reducing RPC latency under load. That’s the unglamorous stuff that payments infrastructure lives or dies on: not “partnership announcements,” but whether operators can upgrade safely and whether integrators get predictable behavior.
Finally, there’s the “neutrality / censorship resistance” angle Plasma hangs on Bitcoin. Their Bitcoin bridge documentation describes pBTC as a 1:1 BTC-backed token with a verifiable link to Bitcoin, using independent verifiers (running their own Bitcoin nodes/indexers) to attest deposits, plus MPC-based signing for withdrawals, and a token framework based on LayerZero’s OFT standard.
I’m not naïve about what this can and can’t do. Stablecoins themselves have issuer controls; Bitcoin anchoring doesn’t remove that. And any bridge design has trust seams—who the verifiers are, how MPC policies are managed, how upgrades happen. But I do think this matters for the specific audience Plasma is aiming at. Institutions don’t just want speed; they want a settlement story that doesn’t depend entirely on one chain’s social layer. Borrowing Bitcoin’s settlement gravity (even partially) is one way to argue for neutrality, especially if the attestation and withdrawal flows remain auditable and hard to quietly rewrite.
So my “human” takeaway is this: Plasma is trying to make stablecoin payments feel like using money, not like operating a machine.
Gasless USD₮ transfers remove the “go buy a second token first” embarrassment. Stablecoin-first gas tries to keep people in the unit they already think in. Reth-based EVM compatibility lowers the integration and audit tax. Low-latency BFT consensus and reward slashing aim for a validator culture that can coexist with institutions. And the chain’s own explorer stats show it’s already operating at a scale where these design choices actually get tested, not just admired.
The part I’ll be watching isn’t whether Plasma can do “fast blocks” or “cool bridges.” It’s whether it can keep the invisible parts healthy: relayer policy that doesn’t become arbitrary gatekeeping, oracle assumptions that don’t create weird fee edge-cases, and ops practices that keep payments apps stable through upgrades.
Because if Plasma gets that boring stuff right, it’s not just another L1 story. It’s a pretty direct answer to a real question: what does a blockchain look like when it’s designed for people who just want to move dollars—quickly, predictably, and without learning the word “gas” at all?

#Plasma $XPL @Plasma
#plasma

When I try to explain what Dusk is doing to a friend who doesn’t live inside crypto Twitter, I don’t start with “privacy” or “regulated DeFi.” I start with a picture: a bank branch made of glass where the public can see that transactions happened, but not the customer’s entire life story. That “one-way glass” idea is basically Dusk’s personality—privacy and auditability treated like engineering constraints, not marketing adjectives.
The thing that makes this feel more than a familiar privacy-chain narrative is that Dusk doesn’t try to force one mode onto every flow. On its settlement layer (DuskDS), it has two native transaction models living side by side: Moonlight (public, account-based) and Phoenix (shielded, note-based, ZK-backed). That sounds like “more options,” but the real point is closer to how finance already behaves: some activity must be transparent (think reporting, attestations, straightforward transfers), while other activity must be confidential (positions, counterparties, negotiated terms). Dusk is basically admitting that regulated markets are not a single-lane road, then building two lanes into the base layer instead of improvising later.
What I find quietly compelling is how much attention Dusk pays to the unsexy integration surface—the part that decides whether something survives contact with real operations. Their HTTP API leans hard into binary handling (proofs, streams, event-driven data) specifically to avoid the overhead of converting everything into JSON/base64. That’s a very “someone got tired of performance and reliability issues” kind of design choice. It’s the difference between a chain that’s fun to demo and a chain that an institution can actually plug into monitoring, reconciliation, and audit workflows without duct tape.
The modular direction ties these choices together. Dusk’s docs describe a stack where DuskDS is the consensus/data-availability/settlement layer, DuskEVM is an EVM-equivalent execution environment, and DuskVM (WASM) is positioned as a future privacy-first execution layer. In plain English: “Let developers build with familiar tools, but keep settlement anchored to the layer designed for regulated privacy.” If you squint, it looks like the same separation-of-duties you see in traditional finance: the part that executes can evolve; the part that settles has to be boring and dependable.
Now, here’s where I deliberately stop sounding like a fan. The DuskEVM docs themselves flag a temporary but very real constraint: a seven-day finalization period (as described in their documentation), with the stated goal of moving toward one-block finality later. For serious financial infrastructure, finality is not a “nice to have.” It changes risk models. It changes how you manage collateral. It changes what “settlement” even means. So right now, I read DuskEVM less as “the place where regulated assets settle today” and more as “the developer ramp that has to earn the settlement narrative over time.”
There’s another tradeoff they state plainly: no public mempool, with the sequencer seeing transactions and ordering by priority fees. Depending on your worldview, that’s either a practical move (less public leakage, different MEV dynamics, more controlled order flow) or a centralization pressure point (more trust concentrated in the sequencer). I don’t think it’s automatically “bad,” but it’s the kind of detail that matters a lot more than slogans when someone asks, “Can we run this in production under oversight?”
If you want signals of ecosystem progress that aren’t just vibes, I like looking for the moments when a network becomes more buildable by outsiders. One concrete example is Rusk (the Rust client): the v1.4.2 release notes include “fully enable 3rd party smart contract support,” which is basically the network saying, “This isn’t only our playground anymore.” Dusk has also discussed contract-deployment work explicitly as a shift away from “deployments only at genesis,” which is a subtle but important step toward a living developer ecosystem.
What makes all of this feel less theoretical is that we can actually peek at the chain’s day-to-day heartbeat. The community explorer currently shows a ~10s average block time over 24h, along with 24h transaction breakdowns that are heavily Moonlight-weighted (public) with a smaller slice of shielded activity, plus live network stats like total supply and active stake. I don’t take “low shielded count” as a failure; I take it as a snapshot of where the network’s usage is today—more public settlement-style activity, fewer privacy-heavy flows—plus an indicator of what adoption still needs to happen at the application layer.
Token utility is where I see Dusk trying to connect the architecture to a real economic loop instead of a narrative loop. On DuskDS, DUSK is the staking and fee asset, with explicit staking mechanics like a 1000 DUSK minimum stake and a two-epoch maturity period (4320 blocks). On the DuskEVM side, the bridge guide is blunt about why developers should care: once bridged, DUSK becomes the native gas token for interacting with EVM contracts using standard tooling. That means “actual app usage” can translate into “demand for the same asset that secures the chain,” which is the kind of loop you want if you’re aiming at long-lived financial infrastructure.
But the token story has a trap that analysts fall into all the time: “DUSK supply” depends on which rail you’re looking at. Market trackers commonly display a 1B max supply and ~500M circulating supply. Meanwhile, the Dusk explorer itself shows a higher total supply figure (and it updates live), which reflects where the network is in its issuance/emissions timeline rather than what any single wrapped representation might show. If you don’t reconcile those views, you can end up arguing about “inflation” or “supply” while different people are literally reading different ledgers.
The last piece I keep circling back to is identity and authorization—because for regulated finance, “compliance” is usually less about surveilling everyone and more about proving the right to do a specific action. Dusk’s own framing leans into selective disclosure and “prove you meet requirements without exposing everything.” That’s a very different vibe from “everything public forever,” and it aligns with how real financial permissions work: you don’t show the entire building your personal file; you show a keycard that opens one door.
If I had to summarize my current read in a very human way: Dusk looks like a project that’s trying to make privacy feel normal and compliance feel precise. It’s building the rails (two transaction models on the same settlement layer), the plumbing (binary-friendly APIs for real operations), and the on-ramp (an EVM environment so developers can actually show up). The big question for me isn’t “can it talk to institutions?”—it’s whether the remaining hard constraints (especially around DuskEVM finality assumptions and sequencer dynamics) evolve in a way that matches the settlement-grade story Dusk is aiming for.
#dusk $DUSK @Dusk
#Dusk