People keep grading “fast chains” the same way.
TPS. Latency. Finality charts. Benchmark screenshots.
It’s understandable. Those numbers are easy to repeat and hard to verify in real life.
But once you’ve watched a market go from quiet to violent in minutes, you learn something uncomfortable. Speed is not only how fast the chain confirms a transaction. Speed is whether a human can keep operating safely when everything is moving.
On-chain, the bottleneck is often permission, not throughput.
I’ll admit it, I get the initial excitement too. Sub-100ms consensus targets. SVM alignment. Firedancer lineage. The engineering intent is clear. The chain wants to behave like a serious venue, not a social network with blocks.
Still, none of that matters if the user experience teaches the worst habit in DeFi: clicking approvals until the wallet stops feeling like a safety device.
That habit is everywhere. You connect a wallet and immediately get dragged into permission chores. Approve this token. Approve that token. Approve a router. Increase allowance. Retry because the UI refreshed. Approve again because the amount changed. Then the familiar suggestion shows up, usually framed as “convenience”:
Approve unlimited so you don’t have to keep signing.
It saves time, but it also creates permanent exposure. And the longer you’ve sat in incident reviews, the more you realize most losses are not caused by genius attackers. They’re caused by ordinary people doing ordinary things under stress. Wrong site. Look-alike domain. A rushed click during volatility. A “just approve it” moment that becomes a year-long permission.
This is why fast chains should be judged by permission handling, not TPS.
Because TPS doesn’t tell you how the system behaves when the user needs to do ten small actions in thirty seconds without turning into a signing robot.
That’s where Fogo Sessions become interesting, not as a feature, but as a statement about what “fast” is supposed to mean.
A Session, in plain words, is a temporary access pass. Think of it like a permission card you issue to an app for a limited time, with a clearly defined scope. Not a blank check. Not an “unlimited forever” approval. More like:
You can do these actions.
Up to this limit.
For this long.
Then it expires.
That sounds simple, but it changes the entire posture of the wallet.
Instead of the wallet acting like a frantic notary that must stamp every single move, it becomes something closer to what people already understand from normal software. Modern apps don’t ask you to confirm every tap with a password. They ask once, with boundaries. Camera access while using the app. Location only when open. Notifications allowed, but not contacts. People get it because it matches how humans actually work.
DeFi never had that middle layer. It mostly forced two extremes: approve every action until you hate it, or approve everything and pretend that isn’t risky.
Sessions try to open a third door.
This is the thesis, stated cleanly because it matters: scoped delegation plus fewer signatures is the next wave of on-chain UX.
Not fewer signatures because people are lazy. Fewer signatures because constant signing is a design failure in high-activity environments. It creates fatigue, and fatigue turns into bad decisions.
And scoped delegation because “fast UX” cannot mean “give up control.”
Trading makes this painfully obvious. Trading is not one action. It’s a long chain of small actions that happen quickly and often change mid-flight. Place. Modify. Cancel. Re-quote. Switch markets. Add margin. Reduce margin. Rebalance. Add collateral. Remove collateral. Withdraw dust. Pay fees. Reposition. React again.
If every one of those steps requires a fresh signature prompt, the chain can be technically fast while the human is practically slow. Worse, the UX starts to pressure users into taking shortcuts:
Sign faster or miss the fill.
That pressure is where mistakes happen. Not because users are careless, but because the system is asking them to act like machines.
This is also where the adoption problem gets misunderstood. People talk about hacks like they’re the only friction. But fear and confusion are a quieter limiter. Many users don’t trade actively because they don’t feel in control of what they’re approving. They don’t know if a permission is one-time or permanent. They don’t know what they’re trusting because prompts are abstract. They don’t know how to revoke without breaking something else. So they either hesitate, or they click through and feel uneasy, or they stop.
A permission system that is legible reduces fear. Not by “educating” users endlessly, but by making the safe choice the normal choice.
Two controls matter here more than people like to admit.
First, spending limits. A real spending limit is not just a parameter for risk teams. It’s clarity. Ordinary users can understand “this session can spend up to X.” That is concrete. That is measurable. It also means if something goes wrong, the blast radius is capped. You’re no longer hoping your wallet’s entire balance isn’t reachable through one old approval.
Second, domain verification. It sounds boring, and that’s exactly why it’s valuable. Most real-world compromises involve deception, not cryptography. The wrong tab, the wrong link, the look-alike site that arrives during chaos. If sessions can be tied to a verified domain or identity signal that users can recognize, you reduce the easiest attack paths. You’re designing for fatigue, not pretending fatigue won’t happen.
There’s also a developer story here that matters if you’ve ever operated products at scale. This cannot be an app-by-app improvisation. The ecosystem is already fragmented enough. Every app inventing its own permission workflow means users have to relearn risk each time they switch venues. And when users can’t build intuition, they stop reasoning and start guessing. Guessing is what turns wallets into liabilities.
Sessions should be a standard primitive. Something developers can rely on without building custom permission gymnastics. SDK support. Open-source patterns. Predictable prompts. Consistent revoke behavior. Clear semantics. Not for elegance, but because consistency is how trust forms over time.
Monotony builds trust. Fragmentation destroys intuition.
That sentence sounds dull, but it’s how operations teams think. Systems that behave the same way in calm conditions and stress conditions are the systems people keep using. The same is true for permission. If every app’s “approval” feels different, every revoke feels different, every limit means something slightly different, users never develop a stable mental model. They either freeze, or they click blindly. Neither is what you want when markets get serious.
And the interesting part is Sessions aren’t only about trading. Once you accept temporary scoped access as normal, a whole class of recurring on-chain behavior becomes less painful without becoming reckless. Subscriptions without monthly signing rituals. Payroll-like payouts with caps. Treasury operations with time-bound rights. Scheduled tasks that can execute within a strict sandbox. Alerts and triggers that can act without demanding constant manual confirmation.
These are not flashy features. They are the plumbing of real usage.
That’s why judging chains by TPS alone keeps missing the point. TPS doesn’t tell you whether the system can support high-frequency behavior without training people to surrender control. TPS doesn’t tell you whether UX under pressure becomes safe, or coercive.
Right now most users are forced into two doors. Sign every action and burn out. Or approve everything and hope.
Session-based UX is the third door: recurring scoped behavior that expires, stays bounded, and stays understandable.
If fast chains want to be taken seriously, this is where they should compete. Not only on how quickly blocks finalize, but on how well permissions are handled when the human is tired, the market is moving, and every click carries consequences.