Vara Network

In this session hosted by The BLOKC, Luis Ramirez, Head of Developer Relations at the Gear Foundation, presents Vara Network, a standalone decentralized Layer 1 that runs scalable smart contracts on a WebAssembly virtual machine. The Gear Foundation is the non-profit that stewards the Gear technologies underpinning the network.

What the session covers

Luis explains that Vara is built on the modular Substrate framework and sets itself apart through two design choices. The first is the Actor Model: instead of the EVM’s sequential, shared global-state execution, every smart contract on Vara behaves as an independent Actor that communicates with other contracts in parallel through asynchronous messaging queues. The second is persistent memory management, which keeps contract state available across executions. Contracts are written in pure Rust and compiled to WebAssembly, giving developers faster execution and strong type safety.

What you can build

Vara is aimed at lowering the UX barriers that slow mainstream adoption. Delayed Messaging lets a contract schedule and trigger its own future executions, removing the need for external off-chain cron bots. The Reverse Gas Model lets application creators cover fees upfront through custom paymaster configurations, so Web2 users can be onboarded without holding tokens or paying gas. Together these features support smoother, consumer-friendly applications.

What’s next

Luis outlines two efforts on the roadmap. One is an AI-powered developer tool that generates complete, functional Rust smart contracts from plain-text prompts. The other is Gear EXE, a decentralized computing network that lets Ethereum applications offload heavy computation to Vara’s parallel engine and return state roots to Ethereum without fragmenting liquidity.