Most people see latency as a technical specification. Traders see it as profit and loss.
In traditional markets, firms spend millions on infrastructure to reduce execution time by microseconds. That is not vanity. It is math. If your order hits the book earlier, your price improves. If it hits later, you pay spread. The difference compounds.
Now bring that reality on chain.
When a network processes blocks in seconds instead of milliseconds, the cost is not theoretical. It becomes slippage. It becomes liquidation inefficiency. It becomes failed arbitrage. It becomes missed entries during volatility spikes. Therefore, latency is not just a performance metric. It is economic structure.
Fogo’s ~40 millisecond block times and sub half second finality change how that structure behaves. Instead of traders adapting strategies around network delay, the network adapts around trading logic. That shift is powerful.
Moreover, lower and more predictable latency reduces uncertainty. And uncertainty is priced into behavior. When confirmation timing fluctuates heavily, traders widen spreads and reduce position size. When confirmation is predictable, confidence increases. Liquidity tightens. Activity grows.
This is where Fogo’s approach becomes financially meaningful.
Because if on-chain execution begins to resemble centralized exchange responsiveness while maintaining decentralized settlement guarantees, then capital allocation models change. Institutions no longer evaluate chains only by decentralization narratives. They evaluate them by execution quality.
However, latency alone is not enough. It must be consistent. A stable 40 milliseconds is more valuable than unstable bursts of performance. Consistency allows modeling. Modeling allows risk management. And risk management is what unlocks serious capital.
From that perspective, Fogo is not just building a faster blockchain. It is compressing economic friction.
My take is simple.
When you reduce execution delay, you reduce invisible costs. When you reduce invisible costs, participation scales naturally. If decentralized finance wants to attract capital that currently lives on centralized venues, then execution timing cannot be negotiable.
Milliseconds may look small on paper.
But in markets, milliseconds are capital.
