Author: Nicholas Garcia, Messari Research Analyst; Translation: LianGuai0xjs
Main Points:
Gear Protocol is a universal cloud infrastructure and smart contract platform based on Substrate. Gear’s functionality is tailored for asynchronous programming and parallel execution, including the actor model, persistent memory, and WebAssembly execution environment.
Vara Network is the first L1 public chain developed using the Gear protocol. It seamlessly integrates a range of functionalities from the Gear protocol.
After two years of development, Vara Network Mainnet has been launched with over 40 applications and integrated with more than 30 ecosystem partners.
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Background:
Gear Protocol was launched in September 2021 by core developers who were involved in the founding of Polkadot and Substrate.
Co-founder and CEO Nikolay Volf has been involved in the work of Polkadot and Substrate since 2015 and was the first to launch a WebAssembly smart contract at LianGuairity Technologies. Co-founder and CFO Ilya Veller has over twenty years of experience in the financial field, having worked at companies such as Renaissance Capital, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America. Co-founder and Head of Development Aleksandr Bugorkov has technical experience from working at companies like Lyft, New Relic, and Spotify. Chief Technology Officer Petr Volynskiy has expertise in product development and technical leadership.
In December 2021, Gear Protocol completed a $12 million venture capital investment led by Blockchain Ventures, with participation from Three Arrows Capital, Lemniscap, Distributed Global, and individuals from Web3 Foundation and LianGuairity Technologies.
In the year following the launch of the Gear protocol, core developers actively integrated it into the Polkadot ecosystem. They established connections with various wallets, data platforms, and governance platforms. In February 2023, Vara Network officially debuted as the L1 network of the Gear Protocol. Its PoS mainnet launched in September 2023.
As of the publication of this report, both Gear Protocol and Vara Network have transitioned to a community-led development model and are on a path of continuous decentralization.
Gear Protocol:
Overview:
Gear Protocol is a smart contract platform based on Substrate, using WebAssembly (Wasm) programs. This allows it to compile contracts from different programming languages such as Rust, C, and C++. The protocol’s application interface can be deployed across multiple networks without modifying the contract. Gear’s unique features are tailored for asynchronous programming, including the actor model, persistent memory, and WebAssembly execution environment.
Substrate:
Substrate is a modular blockchain development framework known for its role in supporting the Polkadot network. Substrate facilitates the integration of multiple specialized blockchains, enhancing scalability. The key features of Substrate include:
No-fork updates, built-in coordination, cross-language support through WebAssembly, lightweight client adaptability, guaranteed finality, and easy integration.
With the help of Substrate, the Gear Protocol accelerates the development process, highlights its core components, and fully utilizes the security and efficiency of Rust. This simplifies the developer’s experience, allowing them to focus on the business logic of specific projects without building a complete blockchain infrastructure. In addition, it also simplifies the integration of projects developed based on the Gear protocol with the Polkadot and Kusama networks.
Actor Model
The Gear Protocol utilizes the actor model to optimize asynchronous message passing and parallel processing, ensuring cross-chain compatibility and faster speed. Unlike systems that rely on shared memory communication, the actor model emphasizes message passing. In this structure, actors (whether smart contracts or users) maintain their own state and interact solely through message passing. The Gear Protocol further improves this process by implementing a mechanism for maintaining ordered message delivery.
Actors can modify their own state, start new entities, or participate without the need for shared memory. The Gear Protocol seamlessly integrates the actor model into its smart contract framework using Rust’s async-await for asynchronous programming. This approach directly utilizes the async/await syntax, minimizes errors, and provides options for both synchronous and asynchronous message passing.
WebAssembly (WASM)
WebAssembly (Wasm) is a binary instruction format designed as a portable compilation target for high-level programming languages. It allows code written in languages such as C, C++, and Rust to be executed at near-native speed in web browsers and other environments. Wasm is designed to be secure, efficient, and platform-independent, making it suitable for various applications including web applications and games. In the Gear Protocol, the integration of Wasm ensures speed and efficiency as smart contracts are directly compiled into machine code, guaranteeing optimal performance and reducing transaction costs.
The advantages of WebAssembly include: speed and cross-platform compatibility; a readable format that reduces manual code intervention; secure execution in a sandbox environment that complies with typical network security protocols; language diversity, as the Gear Protocol supports Rust and has the potential to support C#/C++, Go, and JavaScript in the future.
Persistent Memory
The Gear Protocol uses persistent memory, reflecting the hardware characteristics of the real world and simplifying the development process. By choosing persistent memory instead of traditional storage, Gear maintains the complete program state, making it easier to use complex language structures. With enhanced memory virtualization, Gear can directly manage memory allocation.
Within the Gear framework, parallel message processing is consistent with the CPU cores, ensuring efficient task handling. Messages are categorized based on their specified programs, allowing multiple messages to indicate a program within one processing cycle. Once processed, the information re-enters the queue for subsequent cycles.
Highlighted Capabilities
The customized runtime of the Gear Protocol platform is driven by the actor model and persistent memory technology, providing the following technical capabilities:
● Decentralized execution: Unlike most platforms that require external triggers to activate smart contracts, Gear’s asynchronous message passing allows contracts to send delayed messages. This will enable richer applications, true decentralization, and higher user value.
● Automated message sending: All Gear messages consume gas. With the gas reservation system, if the program’s gas is insufficient, reserved gas can be used. It is worth noting that contracts can schedule messages for future operations, similar to traditional cron jobs, as long as there is gas available, multiple autonomous on-chain operations can be ensured.
● Transaction-free payments: Gear introduces vouchers, providing users with an excellent experience. Vouchers are issued by network entities, and users can send messages to specific programs without paying gas fees. This reflects traditional web services, improves user engagement, simplifies application adoption, and makes the decentralized space more inclusive and user-friendly.
In the fields of DeFi, gaming, social, and applications, use cases involving complex program logic or microservice architecture are more complex, including on-chain automation, delayed messaging, stop-loss mechanisms, dollar-cost averaging strategies, automatic compounding, limit order functionality, and subscription services.
Vara Network
Overview
Vara Network is the first L1 platform developed using the Gear protocol. It seamlessly integrates a range of Gear protocol features, including the actor model, persistent memory, and WASM. Vara is built on the Substrate framework, ensuring non-forking runtime upgrades. In addition, it features functions such as reduced transaction costs, staking, active governance, and ambassador programs.
Compared to most L1 platforms (including Sui, which focuses on sharding but lacks parallel execution, and Aptos, which provides parallel execution but ignores sharding), Vara’s design supports both sharding and parallel execution. Additionally, Vara optimizes developer experience with precise data specifications.
Vara Token
VARA is the native token of the Vara Network, with a total supply of 10 billion. The distribution is as follows:
Founders/Team/Advisors: 20%, locked for one year, then linearly vested over 36 months.
Investors: 21.5%, locked for 12 months, then linearly vested over 12 months.
Foundation: 23%, used for education, public relations, events, infrastructure, and ecosystem development. This includes market-making activities and liquidity management.
Community: 35.5%, used for supporting developer and validator grants, airdrop programs, and offsetting token supply inflation.
VARA is used for every network operation, including transaction fees, staking, and governance mechanisms. The community is exploring a developer reward model similar to existing systems like Astar, Archway, and Evmos. If this developer reward model is adopted, tokens will be automatically allocated as part of block rewards.
The annual inflation rate of VARA is 6%. To mitigate the impact of inflation, 10% of the total token supply will be allocated to the inflation offset pool. Approximately one-third of the block rewards (guaranteed by the foundation) will be directed to this pool to replenish its funds. The tokens in the pool will then be sent to a designated burn address. Through community governance, there is an option to reallocate the funds in this pool to developer grants or allocate a portion of the block rewards to the protocol treasury to encourage future development. Additionally, community voting can be used to lower the annual inflation rate.
Staking
Vara implements the Nominated Proof-of-Stake (NPos) consensus model. Polkadot also adopts this approach, which differs from the DPoS consensus as nominators staking VARA face punishment risks.
Validators complete a payable action called era points every 12 hours. Every 12 hours, a random subset of validators is chosen for validation, and the earned era points are multiplied by a factor. The combination of era points and random validation ensures that validators receive nearly equal rewards on a probabilistic basis. With validators able to earn almost the same rewards and proportionally distribute these rewards to nominators, nominators are incentivized to stake with lower-ranked validators to earn higher rewards. The validator-nominator reward model is designed to decentralize the validators in the Vara network.
Governance
Vara utilizes the OpenGov framework as its native governance model. Polkadot also uses the OpenGov framework, allowing any VARA holder to participate in the governance of Vara.
OpenGov ensures that every decision within the Vara network comes from a community-proposed referendum. Multiple referendums can take place simultaneously, expediting the approval process of proposals. Proposals are divided into tiers with specific conditions, such as designated voting time, maximum eligible votes per referendum, and required VARA collateral. As the tiers increase, the conditions for passing proposals become stricter.
OpenGov also has a governing body called the “Fellowship.” The Fellowship fulfills three main responsibilities: serving as technical advisors, maintaining and developing core protocols and codes, and promoting the technology of VARA. The Fellowship functions similarly to a developer DAO, allowing participation from all users and reducing centralization issues. A tiered system with multiple mechanisms ensures decentralization, including a constitution, community voting for higher positions, and checks and balances to limit leadership control. While the Fellowship cannot pass referendums through a community vote, it can be whitelisted for easier and faster approval.
This model also introduces flexibility in delegation, allowing users to authorize their voting rights based on the amount of tokens they believe in and commit to. The new delegation feature aims to ensure the required voting turnout for proposals while protecting the anonymity of voters and maintaining censorship resistance.
Competitive Analysis
Gear Protocol and Vara Network are entering a highly competitive blockchain environment. They will compete with L1 networks such as Cosmos Interchain, Avalanche Subnets, Ethereum Rollups, and Polkadot LianGuairachains.
These networks emphasize unique trade-offs. Cosmos Interchain leans heavily towards sovereignty. In contrast, the Ethereum and Polkadot ecosystems emphasize shared security.
A significant portion of users are rooted in EVM chains. To stand out, it is necessary to provide better development experiences for developers. Additionally, they need to attract and retain users, likely through the introduction of groundbreaking applications or features.
Progress and Future Roadmap
Since their release at the end of 2021, the core teams have been actively integrating Gear Protocol and Vara Network into the Substrate ecosystem. They have established integrations with top ecosystem wallets such as Talisman, SubWallet, and Nova Wallet. Additionally, they have partnered with notable LianGuairachains and Substrate ecosystem enterprises, including Crust Network, Automata Network, Polkassembly, and Subscan.
Vara Network launched its testnet in 2023, with over 20,000 participants at the time of this report. These participants engage in activities such as NFT minting, gaming, and staking.
Vara Network’s mainnet has also recently been unveiled. As they progress, the foundation aims to support the community in enhancing core technology, expanding functionality, and attracting a wider user base.
Conclusion
Gear Protocol is a Substrate-based cloud infrastructure and smart contract platform designed for asynchronous programming and parallel execution, offering features such as actor model, persistent memory, and WebAssembly execution. Vara Network is the first L1 platform built on Gear Protocol, seamlessly integrating the feature set of Gear Protocol. After two years of development, Vara Network’s mainnet launched on September 20th with over 40 applications and partnerships with over 30 ecosystem collaborators.
Gear Protocol and Vara Network are entering a highly competitive blockchain environment. Their success depends on their ability to leverage the core functionalities of the networks to provide unparalleled experiences for users and developers.
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