I spent part of Thursday hanging out with some fellow Vara builders during the network's sixth ecosystem call, and came away with rather more to think about than I'd bargained for.
Joining me were Bridge from Polybaskets and Sol from AanTV, two projects approaching Vara from very different directions. Polybaskets is rethinking what a prediction market can be. AanTV is building tools to make the increasingly complicated activity happening inside Vara easier for developers to understand.
And then there was yours truly, representing UseVara, where we write about these things, occasionally build a few of our own, and have developed a frankly unreasonable enthusiasm for the engineering happening in this ecosystem.
It was a good conversation. Better still, there was actual news.
Here's what I took away from it.
Polybaskets Isn't Finished Reinventing Prediction Markets
I've already written about Polybaskets, and I've made absolutely no effort to conceal how much I like it. Spoilers, it's a lot.
If you missed our earlier coverage, the short version is that Polybaskets lets you bet on a collection of outcomes rather than treating every prediction as an isolated yes-or-no question.
That's a deceptively powerful idea.
Most prediction markets ask whether something will happen. Polybaskets lets you express a more comprehensive view of how you think events will unfold. You're not necessarily betting on one particular outcome. You're assembling a position around a broader thesis.
And apparently people are getting the hang of it.
Bridge shared some numbers from the recently concluded third season:
- 5,742 indexes created
- 877 active traders
Those are figures reported by the Polybaskets team, but they suggest there's a meaningful amount of experimentation happening on the platform.
What interested me more, though, was where Bridge says they're going next.
Bringing a Proper Trading Desk to Predictions
The Polybaskets team is exploring infrastructure more familiar to traders using perpetual futures exchanges such as Hyperliquid.
Think long and short exposure, bids and asks, order books, and markets where an index can represent something more nuanced than a binary outcome.
Bridge used commodity prices as an example.
If you've got an opinion about where oil is going, the universe of possible outcomes doesn't politely divide itself into yes and no. There's an entire range of prices, and your expectations might change as new information emerges.
Giving traders more expressive instruments could make prediction markets useful for a much wider range of ideas.
To be clear, this is where the team wants to take the product, not an announcement that the new infrastructure is already live.
But it's an ambitious direction, particularly coming from people who've already put a working product in front of actual humans.
The Robots Found an Angle
Another detail from Bridge caught my attention.
Polybaskets has been dealing with automated agents exploiting the timing of short-duration markets.
Imagine an agent programmed to wait until the final seconds before placing a prediction. It doesn't get distracted, doesn't need coffee, and has absolutely no objection to staring at market data at three in the morning.
Human traders are somewhat less enthusiastic about this arrangement.
Bridge described how the team responded with restrictions around certain trading behaviors, while improving the experience for ordinary users through gasless interactions and other features.
I love hearing about this kind of thing.
Not because exploitation is good, but because it means a product has escaped the comfortable world of design assumptions and entered the considerably messier world of people figuring out how to use it.
And occasionally how to beat it senseless.
Real users have a magnificent talent for discovering things nobody thought to include in the specification.
Polybaskets is learning from that experience and adjusting accordingly.
That tells me considerably more about the maturity of a development team than another roadmap featuring twelve vibrant colorful boxes connected by optimistic arrows.
AanTV Is Building Something Vara Developers Could Really Use
Sol joined the conversation to talk about AanTV, a project he originally built on his own during a Vara hackathon.
The idea began with autonomous agents.
When AI agents interact with one another onchain, the resulting messages and program calls can become difficult to interpret. The information may be publicly available, but that doesn't mean it's particularly useful to the poor bastard trying to figure out what actually happened.
AanTV works to decode that activity and turn it into something intelligible.
Useful enough on its own.
But Sol has been working on something considerably more ambitious.
What If You Could Replay That Transaction?
He's developing a browser-based toolkit for inspecting and simulating activity on Vara.
During the call, Sol described capabilities including:
- Decoding Gear program messages.
- Simulating transactions and program calls.
- Interacting with deployed programs on mainnet and testnets.
- Replaying calls against historical network states.
- Selecting a particular block and inspecting behavior using that state.
- Inspecting program interfaces and exposing decoding functionality through an SDK.
If you've spent time building on Ethereum, some of that should sound familiar.
Ethereum developers have spent years accumulating increasingly sophisticated debugging, simulation, and transaction-inspection tools.
Vara developers need those same capabilities, adapted to a rather different execution environment.
And that last part matters.
Vara's asynchronous messaging and persistent program state open up fascinating possibilities, but they also introduce questions developers need tools to answer.
What triggered this behavior? What state was the program in? What happened between these two actors? Can I reproduce this interaction without firing another transaction into the blockchain and hoping for the best?
Being able to inspect those things without assembling a custom debugging environment every time would be enormously useful.
One Developer, One Irritating Problem
What I particularly enjoyed was hearing why Sol started building the new tooling.
Someone he'd worked with during the hackathon complained about how difficult certain kinds of development inspection and simulation were on Vara.
So Sol started building something to fix it.
That's it.
Somebody needed a better tool, and somebody else decided to make one.
My guy. I fraking love that.
A lot of excellent software has entered the world through precisely that sort of irritation.
The new developer toolkit is still in beta, and Sol is looking for people willing to test it and identify missing capabilities.
He specifically invited developers to tell him what information they'd like AanTV to expose.
We've already got AanTV on our editorial radar, but after this conversation I'm rather interested in getting our hands on the development tools themselves.
There are a few projects in our workshop that could provide some entertaining test cases.
Sol, if you're reading this, consider that an invitation.
Meanwhile, We've Been Making Governance a Little Easier to Understand
Since this was our first ecosystem call, I also had an opportunity to explain why UseVara exists in the first place.
I've been around blockchain since Bitcoin in 2011, and I've watched plenty of projects generate tremendous excitement around things they might someday build.
One of the things that drew me to Vara was watching its engineers do the opposite.
They kept delivering things.
The core developers would describe some ambitious piece of infrastructure and then, sometimes in surprisingly short order, there it was.
Meanwhile, much of the public conversation remained fixated on the price of VARA.
I understand why people care about token prices. But at some point I found myself considerably more interested in what people could actually build with the technology.
Eventually, we decided to start writing about it.
That's UseVara.
And as it turns out, the past couple of weeks have involved quite a bit of building on our end.
VoteVara Is Live
One of our biggest recent projects went online Thursday morning.
VoteVara.com is our new companion site dedicated to explaining Vara's OpenGov referendums in plain language.
The idea emerged after we spent time examining Referendum 87, which concerned a grant arrangement supporting 12 independent validators.
The referendum passed with approximately 98% approval.
Wonderful.
But by our count, only about 20 addresses participated.
That's a rather small dinner party for a network-wide governance decision.
A decisive result among the people who vote isn't necessarily evidence of broad participation by the people eligible to vote. And as governance decisions become more consequential, participation deserves attention.
I'm not suggesting the outcome of Referendum 87 was illegitimate, or that low turnout alone proves an exploitable weakness.
I'm saying we should make it easier for people to understand what's happening and decide whether they want to participate. Because wide participation is crucial to a thriving community and has the wonderful side effect of making the exploitable attack surface for votes like this MUCH SMALLER.
VoteVara is our humble attempt to help.
It provides referendum histories, explanations of active proposals, and a glossary of the terminology people encounter when navigating OpenGov.
For an active referendum, we want readers to understand exactly what an Aye or Nay vote represents without requiring a graduate degree in blockchain governance and a stiff drink.
We're not telling anybody how to vote. Do your thing.
We'd just like more people to understand what they're voting on. And more importantly...fucking vote.
It's a beta, so there will undoubtedly be a few things to tidy up. But it's live, it's useful, and you can reach it directly or through UseVara.
Referendum 90 also came up during the call, with the host encouraging the community to examine it and participate. If you haven't looked into it yet, VoteVara is a good place to start understanding the proposal and what the voting options mean.
Yes, We Build Things Too
Toward the end of the conversation, Bridge and Sol talked about their development roadmaps.
I couldn't resist mentioning a couple of things we've been playing with ourselves.
UseVara is an editorial publication, but the people behind it are developers. We didn't arrive in Vara because we needed another blockchain to write about.
We arrived because we like the technology.
And when we get curious about whether something can be built, Vara is usually where we start tinkering.
There are two experiments we're particularly enjoying right now.
Can We Take Varbear to Solana and Bring Him Home Again?
We've been working in the sandbox on a wrapper bridge concept connecting Vara fungible tokens (VFTs) with Solana's SPL token standard.
The goal is fairly straightforward to describe.
Take a fungible token created on Vara, represent it appropriately on Solana, and provide a way for that representation to make the return journey without corrupting supply accounting or giving somebody an opportunity to disappear with the assets.
Straightforward to describe, anyway.
Cross-chain interoperability has a marvelous habit of becoming considerably more complicated the longer you stare at the security assumptions.
Our proposed guinea pig is VBEAR, the Varbear token we created with Tokenator and introduced to RivrDEX in an earlier UseVara experiment.
The architecture looks promising on paper, and we're enjoying working through the implementation and the nasty edge cases.
This is still sandbox work. We're not announcing a live bridge, inviting deposits, or claiming the security questions are settled.
But we're excited about it.
Part of the reason we created VBEAR was to have a real token we could use while exploring Vara's growing collection of applications.
Taking the little green bastard for a vacation on Solana seems entirely consistent with that tradition.
And when we have something worth demonstrating, we'll show you what we built, how we built it, and what we learned along the way.
There's Also a Spaceship Involved
The other project is a persistent multiplayer space game.
This one's particularly interesting to us because it gives us an excuse to explore some of the characteristics that make Vara different from a traditional EVM environment.
Persistent state. Asynchronous messages. Independent programs interacting with one another. Autonomous behavior.
Those aren't just phrases from a blockchain feature list. They're tools you can use to construct systems that continue to behave and interact over time.
So we've been building a shared space environment and seeing what happens when we put those ideas to work.
It's still an internal project, and I'm not ready to start giving away all the details.
Our release philosophy is pretty uncomplicated: first make something we genuinely enjoy playing, then see whether anybody else would like to play it too.
There will be more on that when we've got something we're particularly pleased with.
For now, we're having fun.
Which, incidentally, is a perfectly good reason to build software. I'd even go so far as to recommend it. All the cool developers are doing it.
Something Interesting Is Happening Here
What I enjoyed most about the call was how different the projects were.
Polybaskets is developing financial products for people who want more expressive ways to trade predictions.
AanTV is building tools that make sophisticated blockchain interactions more understandable to the people writing software.
We're trying to make governance easier to navigate while spending some of our spare time experimenting with interoperability and persistent virtual worlds.
None of those projects looks particularly similar to the others.
And that's encouraging.
An ecosystem doesn't become interesting because everybody builds another version of the same application, changes the logo, and declares the beginning of a new financial civilization.
It becomes interesting when people with different backgrounds, interests, and occasionally ridiculous ideas start discovering what they can accomplish with the available tools. Diversity, people. It's what makes blockchain community DNA hardy.
Vara has spent years developing those tools.
Now we're seeing more people pick them up.
I think the next chapter of this network is going to be written by those people.
Not necessarily the biggest teams, or the projects with the most elaborate announcements, but developers who identify something they want to make and get on with making it.
Want to Get Involved?
Bridge and the Polybaskets team are looking for users willing to explore their platform and provide feedback as their prediction-market infrastructure evolves.
Sol is looking for developers to help test AanTV and its expanding debugging capabilities.
And we're always looking for interesting projects to write about at UseVara.
If you're building something on Vara, even if it's just an idea you're starting to work through, come talk to us.
We've got a few turbo nerds around here who enjoy discussing these things, and if what you're doing might interest the wider community, we'd love to help tell that story.
Thanks to the Vara ecosystem team for hosting the call, and especially to Bridge and Sol for sharing what they've been working on.
I had a hell of a good time.
There are some talented people building on Vara, and I suspect we've barely scratched the surface of what they're going to make.
Long may we wobble.
— Varbear
UseVara.org is an independent publication covering the Vara ecosystem. Find us on X at @usevaraorg, or explore our governance companion at VoteVara.com.