I wasn’t even planning to look at Fogo tonight. I was just scrolling and somehow ended up reading threads and docs and random comments and now it’s 1:47am and I’m sitting here wondering if this is actually something… or just another “fast L1” I’ll forget in six months.
The SVM angle is what hooked me. I’ll admit that.
Using Solana’s virtual machine instead of building some weird custom thing from scratch is kind of… practical? Like at least they’re not pretending they invented physics. Solana’s execution model works. It’s been battle tested. It’s messy sometimes, sure, but it runs hot. So Fogo leaning into that doesn’t feel stupid.
But then my brain immediately goes wait… if you’re using SVM… why not just build on Solana?
I keep circling back to that. It’s like opening a burger place right next to McDonald’s and saying “don’t worry guys, we use the same kitchen equipment.” Cool. But why though.
I get the sovereignty angle. Control your own consensus, tweak incentives, don’t rely on Solana governance, optimize stuff differently. That part makes sense. Independence matters in crypto. People love their own chain. Everyone wants to be the main character.
Still… high performance isn’t rare anymore. It used to be impressive. Now it’s like saying your phone has a fast chip. Yeah, so does everyone else’s.
Solana. Sui. Aptos. Sei. Monad coming soon. It’s like we’re stacking sports cars in a city with traffic jams and no drivers. We don’t even have enough real users to justify half this infrastructure.
And that’s what makes me uneasy.
It’s not that Fogo looks bad. It doesn’t. Actually it looks thoughtful. Using SVM isn’t random hype, it’s a calculated move. Less dev friction. Rust devs don’t have to relearn everything. Tooling already exists. That’s smart.
But smart doesn’t equal necessary.
I think the only way this works is if they specialize. If they just go “we’re fast too,” that’s dead on arrival. If they optimize for something specific — gaming, latency heavy DeFi, on-chain orderbooks that don’t choke — then okay, I can see the angle. SVM is built for parallel execution. That’s real.
But if it’s just another general purpose chain hoping liquidity magically appears… idk man.
Liquidity doesn’t just show up because your TPS number is high. Stablecoins, bridges, wallets, exchange support — that stuff takes grind and relationships and timing. And tokenomics. God… tokenomics probably matter more than the tech.
If insiders hold everything and emissions are aggressive, it won’t matter how fast it is. We’ve seen that movie already.
And culture. That’s the weird part nobody talks about. Ethereum has that serious institutional vibe. Solana has chaos energy and meme velocity. Chains are tribes. If Fogo doesn’t build identity, it’ll just feel like “Solana but not Solana.”
But also… maybe that’s the point?
Maybe execution environments becoming modular is the bigger trend. SVM here, EVM there, different consensus under the hood. If Fogo is betting on that future, that’s actually kind of forward thinking.
I keep going back and forth.
Part of me thinks this is quietly clever. Like the kind of project that looks boring until a bull market and then suddenly everyone’s calling it the next big thing. Crypto has the memory of a goldfish.
Another part of me thinks we’re just building more highways when there aren’t enough cars. Speed for what? For traders to rotate liquidity between chains every few months?
I don’t hate it. I’m not sold either.
It feels like a solid technical decision wrapped in a brutally competitive arena. And competition in L1 land is vicious. Gravity matters more than elegance. If developers don’t show up, none of this matters.
So yeah… I’m intrigued. Cautiously. But I’m not emotionally attached.
I’ve learned that lesson already.