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.
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.
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.
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.