I’ll be honest — I didn’t go looking for Fogo.
It showed up in a thread about SVM ecosystems, and my first reaction was predictable: “another L1?” We already have more base layers than we know what to do with. So if you’re launching one now, it has to answer a harder question than speed.
What caught me wasn’t a metric. It was the decision to build around the Solana Virtual Machine and not pretend that’s revolutionary.
That restraint matters.
SVM isn’t new. It’s been battle-tested. Developers understand the execution model, the account structure, the way parallelization behaves under load. So when Fogo leans into SVM, it’s not asking builders to relearn fundamentals. It’s saying: the engine works — we’re optimizing the rails around it.
From my experience, that lowers friction more than flashy architecture ever does. Builders don’t want to spend months understanding a new VM unless the payoff is extreme. Familiar execution means migration feels incremental, not experimental.
But it also removes excuses.
If Fogo stumbles under congestion, no one will say “early tech.” They’ll compare it directly to mature SVM environments. That’s a high bar to set for yourself, especially this early. And I kind of respect that. It’s harder to hide behind novelty when you inherit a known standard.
Performance chains don’t usually fail in benchmarks. They fail in edge cases — unpredictable demand, fee instability, coordination complexity between validators. The real test isn’t peak throughput. It’s whether the system stays uneventful when nobody’s watching.
That’s what I’m paying attention to.
If Fogo can take SVM-level execution and make it feel stable rather than dramatic, that’s when it stops being “another high-performance L1” and starts becoming infrastructure. And infrastructure, at least in my experience, should feel boring. Predictable. Slightly uninteresting even.
Speed is easy to showcase.
Consistency is harder to earn.