Technology Aspect
Gear Protocol, built on Substrate, facilitates swift dApp development. It is the most developer-friendly way to implement programs and smart contracts with arbitrary logic and of any complexity.
Vara benefits from Gear Protocol's unique tech stack that includes the Actor Model, Persistent Memory and the WebAssembly virtual machine (Wasm). More details can be found on Gear Wiki.
Actor Model
In the Actor Model of communication, programs and users are known as "actors." Actors maintain their state privacy and communicate through messages, enhancing network security. All communications are asynchronous but logically guaranteed to be handled, which increases the achievable network speed and allows the building of more sophisticated dApps.
For more info, read in Gear Wiki.
Persistent Memory
The Persistent Memory concept entails that programs do not rely on shared storage; instead, their complete state is consistently stored within their respective memory spaces. Clever and effective memory virtualization techniques allow tracking memory access and ensuring that only required pages are persisted and loaded when needed. It removes many complexities, streamlining the development process while mapping running programs and their states to more closely resemble real-life operating system primitives.
For more info, read in Gear Wiki.
Wasm
WebAssembly allows the running of any bytecode in a sandboxed environment. Smart contracts in Vara are run as Wasm programs (Actors). Since Wasm can be compiled from a variety of common programming languages, it considerably lowers the barrier to entry for developers arriving from the Web2 space. Enabling native speed for deterministic cross-platform computations, Wasm is Web3 development unlocked.
For more info, read in Gear Wiki.
Network Upgrade
Like all software systems, blockchains require periodic updates for security patches and other code changes. In the early days, blockchains had to implement forks to make updates, causing instability and price fluctuations. Coordinating updates within a decentralized community proved challenging.
Vara, built on the Substrate blockchain development framework, offers a solution with forkless runtime upgrades. Substrate enables the deployment of enhanced runtime capabilities, introducing breaking changes without a hard fork. This is possible because the runtime definition is a component of a Substrate chain's state, allowing network participants to update it through an extrinsic.