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Vara Network is a standalone layer-1 blockchain built on Gear Protocol. It is optimized for smart contract execution — combining fast finality, WASM-based contracts, and an actor model for asynchronous messaging. RivrDEX is built entirely on Vara. Everything you do on RivrDEX — swapping, adding liquidity, creating pairs — runs as on-chain WASM smart contracts on Vara.

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Key properties

  • Fast block times — transactions confirm quickly, enabling a responsive trading experience.
  • WASM smart contracts — contracts compile to WebAssembly, giving developers a wide choice of languages and predictable execution.
  • Near-zero transaction costs — gas fees on Vara are a fraction of those on EVM chains, making frequent interactions practical.
  • Actor model — contracts communicate via asynchronous message passing, enabling composable and non-blocking contract interactions.

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Why RivrDEX is built on Vara

A DEX needs speed, low cost, and reliable smart contract execution. Vara delivers all three:
  • Speed — fast block times mean swaps and liquidity changes settle without long waits.
  • Near-gasless UX — near-zero fees remove the friction that discourages small trades or frequent LP activity.
  • WASM runtime — contracts run in a sandboxed, high-performance environment well-suited to financial logic.
Together, these properties make Vara the right foundation for a high-frequency trading application.

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Gear Protocol

Vara is built on Gear Protocol. Gear provides the underlying WASM runtime (gear.rs) and the actor-based messaging system that Vara’s smart contracts run on. If you are a developer looking to understand the execution environment, the Gear Protocol documentation is the right starting point.

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Developer tooling

To interact with Vara smart contracts programmatically, you can use:
  • Polkadot.js API — the standard Substrate/Polkadot JavaScript library, compatible with Vara.
  • Gear.js SDK — a higher-level SDK purpose-built for Gear-based chains like Vara.
RivrDEX does not publish a public SDK today. If you are building an integration, start with the Gear.js SDK for the most straightforward path to reading state and sending messages to Vara contracts.

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Learn more

Vara Network

Explore the Vara Network — documentation, ecosystem, and validator info.

Gear Protocol

Read about the underlying Gear Protocol runtime and WASM smart contract model.