Vara Network Bootcamp | New Developer-Friendly, Leading the Development of Next-GenWeb3 Apps
For developers new to the Web3 field, how can they quickly find their direction? Vara Network might be the ideal starting point! On the evening of June 18th, at 20:00, the [Vara Network Bootcamp] introductory session was held as scheduled, attracting nearly 700 developers. Maria and Hangbiao from the Gear Foundation brought fantastic and informative content, introducing the latest updates and technical advantages of the Vara ecosystem and diving deep into how to develop and deploy Web3 applications using Vara Network. Let’s revisit this wonderful presentation!
⌛️ Replay: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1mT421a7Ce/
Multi-directional Exploration, Unveiling the Mysteries of the Vara Ecosystem
The Origin and Development of Vara Network
Vara Network is a new Layer 1 blockchain brand. Its founders have been involved in the entire R&D process from Ethereum to Polkadot. Maria mentioned that after Polkadot’s mainnet launch in 2021, founder Nikolay Volf independently initiated the Gear Protocol project. After two years of infrastructure and base contract development, the Vara Network mainnet officially launched at the end of September last year.
Shortly after its mainnet launch, Vara Network was recognized by Coinbase and quickly listed its token $VARA.Maria emphasized that Vara Network is one of the few projects recognized by top exchanges early in its mainnet launch, proving its technical strength and compliance.
Recently, Vara Network introduced a feature integrated with TG Mini Programs. By creating TG Mini Programs on Vara, you can promote the Web3 adoption of your dApp while maintaining the advantages of decentralization, privacy, and security, leveraging Vara’s unique game-friendly features.
Founding Team and Investors
Maria then introduced the founding team of Vara Network. Founder Nikolay Volf was a core engineer at Parity Technologies, and CFO Ilya Veller has experience working at renowned financial institutions like Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Co-founder Alex Bugorkov has held executive positions at several major Web2 companies for over ten years. The team also includes many experienced members with international backgrounds. Moreover, the team’s international nature is reflected in its diverse community, with members from North America, Mexico, Latin America, China, Europe, and India.
Vara Network’s investor background is also very strong, featuring top VCs from both the East and West. These include well-known overseas investment institutions like Block Change and Leanness Cap, as well as Chinese investors like Hashkey Capital and DI. These top VC teams provide solid support for the Vara project. Notably, Gavin Wood has also invested in Vara Network.
Technical Advantages of Vara Network
Vara Network is an asynchronous execution blockchain that supports higher concurrency and simultaneous access by a large number of users, making it very suitable for applications requiring high TPS and a large number of transactions. Maria highlighted that Vara primarily uses the Rust language for development, making it compatible with other programming languages and very friendly to developers with rich Web2 experience but limited Web3 experience.
One-stop Developer Support Activities
Vara Introductory Practical Training Camp
In terms of developer support, Vara offers a one-stop developer help service package, including developer courses in collaboration with OneBlock+. The courses cover the basics of the Rust language and how to develop and create demos on Vara. After the course, developers can take quizzes on Gear Academy to consolidate their knowledge and receive rewards. The quizzes mainly consist of multiple-choice questions, culminating in a coding challenge. Developers with some foundational knowledge can easily earn a reward of 50U in equivalent tokens.
Hackathons and Grant Programs
Vara Network hosts a monthly Varathon hackathon event, which is highly suitable for developer participation due to its high frequency. Maria shared that Vara has already hosted five Varathons, with teams from China winning twice, showcasing the strength and competitive edge of Chinese developers. Therefore, Vara Network encourages everyone to participate in the hackathons after completing the courses. By submitting a demo, you can receive a $50 reward. If you are lucky enough to win first or second place, or even the championship, you can win rewards exceeding 6000U.
Vara Grants
Additionally, Vara offers a grant program supporting infrastructure, DeFi, gaming, NFTs, and mini program-based development projects. The grant amounts range from $10,000 to $50,000, with potentially higher rewards for particularly outstanding projects.
Community Ambassador Program
Vara is actively recruiting community ambassadors. Currently, there are about a dozen ambassadors working for Vara in China, responsible for online and offline community activities, content forwarding, translation, design, and introducing resources for ecosystem development and providing creative ideas. Maria also mentioned a university ambassador program, inviting students proficient in the Rust language and interested in building the Vara ecosystem to join.
Leading Architecture Supporting Next-Generation Applications — Exploring Vara Network’s Core Technology
Vara Network’s Underlying Advantages
HangBiao introduced the robust scalability and security of Vara, making it capable of supporting next-generation gaming and financial applications. Vara Network mainly consists of three components: WASM smart contracts, Gear Protocol, and Substrate.
Although Vara uses a similar technology framework to Polkadot, it is a completely independent public chain. HangBiao pointed out that Gear Protocol is a crucial component built on Substrate, consisting of multiple packages primarily used to support the execution of WASM smart contracts. Unlike Parity’s official Pallet Contracts smart contract execution model, Gear Protocol implements an actor-based computing model. In this model, each program has its own independent space, and programs communicate via message passing, ensuring memory safety and parallel computation efficiency.
Secondly, Vara adopts WebAssembly (WASM) virtual machine technology. WASM is known for its efficient and high-performance architecture, enabling near-native execution speed. Many programming languages currently support compilation to WASM, with Vara primarily developed using AssemblyScript. The open standard and good architecture of WASM give Vara significant advantages in performance and cost.
Contract Storage and Memory Management
HangBiao mentioned that in Vara’s architecture, contracts do not share memory, and storage is directly based on WASM’s linear memory model, storing the program’s memory pages on-chain. Each program can only access its memory, with all memory stored at once, improving storage efficiency and security. Additionally, Vara uses lazy pages technology, loading memory intelligently to retrieve necessary memory pages only during program execution, thus more efficiently reading and updating on-chain data.
Development Experience and Asynchronous Programming
Vara is the first blockchain platform to support the async/await syntax in Rust within smart contracts. Early asynchronous programming often led to callback hell in code, but modern JavaScript syntax with Promise and async/await support has made asynchronous programming more concise. Rust also has Futures, allowing the use of async/await syntax for a smooth experience similar to synchronous programming.
HangBiao introduced that the development experience on Vara has significantly improved, stating, “We have customized an async runtime in the standard library for Vara, providing a convenient development environment for developers.” The latter part of the course will detail this customized async runtime.
How Vara Scales
Currently, Vara has a block time of 3 seconds and can handle 2000 to 3000 messages per second. HangBiao explained that this block time was chosen to balance generation rate, database size, and propagation time across all validation nodes. It can scale the blockchain’s transaction processing capability through parallel message processing.
Diverse Application Scenarios
Vara’s strong technical support enables its application in various scenarios. As a general-purpose smart contract platform, Vara supports all mainstream applications. Currently, applications developed on Vara lean more towards DeFi or gaming because these applications can better leverage Vara’s unique technical advantages, such as delayed execution of messages or periodic on-chain automated tasks. You can build traditional DeFi applications, NFT games, virtual worlds, social finance (SocFi), and marketplaces on Vara.
Vara allows developers to create programs with complex structures and asynchronous interactions for various blockchain deployment purposes. Vara will continually update a collection of new dApp examples for developers to reference and use.
📌 More information can be found on Gear dApps: https://github.com/gear-dapps
Join the Vara Network Bootcamp!
The “Vara Network Bootcamp” jointly launched by Vara Network and OneBlock+ starts on June 25th, with specific varathon details to be announced in July. This course aims to help developers quickly master Vara Network smart contract development, covering everything from basic concepts and environment setup to contract deployment. Vara Network will make your Web3 development journey easier and more efficient.
🗺️ More Information: Vara Network Bootcamp Kicks Off Soon! Quickly Master DApp Development and Smart Contract Technology
📌 Fill out the enrollment form now: https://wj.qq.com/s2/14712805/u51v/
🔥 Scan the QR code get the latest course updates!
👇🏻 Course Schedule
🔸 Course Learning: 6 recorded lessons + 6 online Office Hour live Q&A sessions
🔸 Activity Sharing: Irregular technical workshops/roundtable discussions
🔸 Project Practice: 1 online Mini Hackathon
🎉 Course Benefits
🏆 Annual Leaderboard Rewards: Community points for exchanging merchandise and annual token airdrop rewards. A rare opportunity!
👉🏻 OneBlock+ Zealy Community: https://zealy.io/cw/oneblock-7054
By participating in the courses jointly launched by OneBlock+ and Vara Network, you will have the opportunity to receive the following rich benefits:
🎁 Zealy Points: Earn Zealy points by participating in course learning and activities as required, redeemable for merchandise and annual token airdrop rewards.
🎁 Official Graduation Certificate: Complete the course and assignments as required to receive an official certification graduation certificate.
🎁 Course Rewards: Complete the course and assignments as required to receive up to $150 in equivalent $VARA token rewards.
🎁 Hackathon Participation Rewards: Submit a demo as required to receive a $50 incentive, with a total monthly prize pool of up to $6,000.
About OneBlock+
OneBlock+ is the first and the largest blockchain developer community in China. At OneBlock+, we provide full support for developers with their substrate studies and further set off their career paths. We host Polkadot Hackathons every season to attract top-notch developers to build and innovate for the prosperity of the ecosystem. As a greater China technology resource integrator, OneBlock+ also partners with developers, communities, business elites, and key media who have business insights and experiences in the blockchain industry to provide educational events, such as technical courses, webinars, AMAs, and offline events for the industry. Want to shape the crypto world together? Come and join us today!
