Vara is doing some weird, interesting things with blockchains. We made a whole publication to keep an eye on it.
There are enough blockchains. We know. You know. The guy in your Telegram DMs who would very much like you to bridge $600 to something called HyperBonkChain knows.
So the existence of another network, by itself, is not especially interesting.
What is interesting is when a network starts making different kinds of things practical.
That’s why we’re here.
Welcome to UseVara.
We’re an independent publication following the Vara ecosystem: the applications people are building, the infrastructure underneath them, the experiments that work, the ones that get weird, and—possibly our favorite part—the things nobody has built yet.
Because Vara has our attention.
So, what caught our eye?
Vara is a standalone Layer 1 built on Gear Protocol. Underneath a lot of the technical terminology is one idea we find much more interesting than another argument about transactions per second:
Programs on Vara can behave more like independent little actors than traditional smart contracts waiting around to be poked.
They can hold state. They can receive messages. They can send messages. They can communicate asynchronously. They can schedule work for later.
That sounds like implementation trivia until you start asking what people might actually build with it.
Think of a game world whose characters keep their state between visits, or a payment agreement that calculates what has accrued while nobody is staring at the screen. These are possibilities enabled by the design, not promises that every application already delivers them. We want to find the ones that do.
Vara also supports gasless and signless interaction patterns that let developers hide some of the ritual normally required to use a blockchain. A developer can sponsor transaction costs, and applications can use temporary accounts so users don’t necessarily have to approve every tiny interaction individually.
That matters because wallets are useful.
Making somebody click APPROVE TRANSACTION seventeen times to play a game is not.
More importantly, people are actually building things
This is where a lot of blockchain stories fall apart.
Interesting architecture is lovely. A GitHub repository is nice. A 47-page PDF containing the words revolutionary decentralized ecosystem is technically a document.
Eventually somebody has to build something.
Vara’s ecosystem directory now contains dozens of projects and integrations spanning DeFi, games, infrastructure, NFTs, social applications, AI and developer tooling. Current featured projects include RivrDEX, an AMM; Polybaskets, which bundles prediction markets into tradable thematic baskets; and GrowStreams, which streams tokens continuously for things like payroll, bounties, subscriptions and revenue sharing.
There’s ZK Poker, attempting a card game with verifiable dealing and hidden hands, and V-Starship, an arcade shooter built heavily with AI tools. They are different answers to the same useful question: what does Vara contribute to the experience?
Good.
We like strange.
Not because every strange idea will work. Plenty of new ideas do not.
Strange is valuable because it means people have moved past asking:
“How do we rebuild the same crypto app on this chain?”
and started asking:
“What can we do here that would have been annoying, expensive or impractical somewhere else?”
That second question is much more interesting.
Independent, and interested
Let’s establish that early.
UseVara is not the Vara newsroom.
We’re independent.
We like the technology. We like the direction. We think there are interesting people building interesting things here.
That does not require pretending every project is brilliant, every token goes up, every roadmap arrives on schedule or every experiment deserves to survive.
We will celebrate good ideas, examine how products work, and say plainly when a promising demo is still a demo. That is how we give builders credit for what they have made and readers a reason to trust us.
We’re also interested in what doesn’t exist yet
This may be the biggest reason we created UseVara.
Covering existing projects is only half the fun.
A technology becomes interesting when it starts giving people ideas.
So alongside news, project profiles, guides and ecosystem coverage, we’re going to spend a lot of time on something we call Dream Projects.
These are things we think somebody could build with Vara.
Not imaginary products presented as real ones.
Not announcements for teams that don’t exist.
Ideas.
What would continuous micropayments do to subscriptions if a subscription could cost fractions of a cent at a time?
Could an autonomous software agent earn money, maintain a budget and purchase services from another autonomous agent?
What happens to online games when important parts of the world can continue operating independently instead of waiting for the player to click something?
Could one human operate a surprisingly large business if hundreds or thousands of tiny software actors handled narrowly defined jobs?
Could a bounty exist for twelve seconds?
Could a marketplace operate without anybody remembering to operate it?
We don’t know.
That’s the point.
Some of those ideas will be dumb.
A few might be excellent.
And eventually we want somebody reading one of them to say:
Wait. I could build that.
You do not need to fall in love with a blockchain
We’re not interested in turning Vara into a personality trait.
Technology is infrastructure.
You should be able to use the good parts without joining a religion.
So we’re going to approach Vara the same way we would approach any interesting new tool: by figuring out what it is unusually good at, watching what smart people do with it, trying things ourselves, and occasionally asking questions that are probably more fun than the ones in the documentation.
Expect explainers, project visits, guides, interviews, experiments and the occasional bear.
And when something is particularly interesting, we are absolutely going to poke it with a stick.
This is UseVara
If you already build on Vara, stick around. We want to know what you’re making.
If you know crypto but Vara is just another logo you’ve scrolled past, you are probably exactly who we wrote this for.
And if you’ve never written a line of Rust in your life, that’s fine too. You don’t need to understand the engine before you can recognize that somebody has built a very interesting machine.
We’re starting with one simple question:
What can people actually do with Vara?
Then we’re going to ask the more dangerous one:
What else could they do?
Let’s find out.