I didn’t approach Fogo with excitement.
I approached it with fatigue.
Another L1. Another promise of speed. At this point, performance claims feel like background noise. So what made me pause wasn’t a benchmark — it was the decision to build around the Solana Virtual Machine and not pretend that’s groundbreaking.
That choice feels intentional.
SVM is already understood. Developers know how it behaves. They know the account model, how parallel execution interacts with state, where congestion can create friction. By choosing that runtime, Fogo isn’t asking for patience while it “figures things out.” It’s stepping directly into a known standard.
That’s confidence, but also risk.
Because now the comparison is automatic. If performance drops, if coordination under load gets messy, there’s no novelty shield. People will compare it directly to mature SVM ecosystems. That’s a harder benchmark than launching a custom VM nobody can properly evaluate yet.
What interests me is what Fogo isn’t doing.
It’s not trying to rewrite execution theory. It’s not marketing a new programming model just to sound innovative. It seems more focused on operational quality — making a proven engine run cleanly in its own environment.
From experience, that’s usually where things break.
High-performance systems look great in controlled conditions. The real test is unpredictable demand. Fee stability. Validator coordination. Whether throughput stays steady when real usage hits instead of test traffic.
If Fogo can keep SVM-style execution uneventful under stress, that’s meaningful. Not flashy, but meaningful. Infrastructure should feel boring. If it feels dramatic, something’s wrong.
I don’t watch Fogo for raw TPS.
I watch it to see whether performance remains consistent when nobody’s celebrating. Because speed gets attention — but sustained stability is what builders quietly gravitate toward.
And by anchoring itself to SVM, Fogo already chose the standard it wants to be measured against.