When I judge a trading-focused chain says “fast,” I don’t ask for a TPS chart. I ask two boring questions: (1) How many times will a user be interrupted to sign? (2) What happens when they forget to keep “gas dust” around? If the answer is “just sign more” or “use a separate burner wallet,” then the UX is being paid for with either fatigue or extra risk. For bots and recurring strategies, that friction isn’t cosmetic it decides whether people automate at all. And if a chain needs a special wallet stack to feel usable, adoption tends to stall outside the crypto-native bubble.
Fogo’s bet is that SVM compatibility plus a native Sessions primitive can reduce signing/gas friction while keeping permissions explicitly bounded.
Fogo runs the Solana Virtual Machine, so the programming model is the familiar “programs + accounts” world. The extra layer is Fogo Sessions: instead of signing every single transaction, the user signs an intent message once, and that intent becomes a time-bounded authorization the app can use to submit follow-up actions. Fogo’s docs describe Sessions as combining account abstraction with paymasters for fees.
Account abstraction here is practical: the user signs the intent with a keypair that proves ownership, so any Solana wallet can create the session even if it doesn’t “support Fogo” natively. That matters because “new chain UX” often fails at the first wallet incompatibility.
What makes this more than a UX trick is the guardrails. The intent includes a domain field that restricts which on-chain programs the session is allowed to interact with, and sessions can be “limited” (a list of tokens with per-token limits) or “unlimited.” They also have an expiry and must be renewed. In other words: the chain is trying to make “I authorize this app to do X, for Y time, within Z limits” a first-class object not a messy off-chain agreement between a dApp and a wallet popup.Fees are the other half. Sessions include centralized paymasters so users can transact without paying gas fees directly. Whether you like that trade depends on your threat model, but it’s consistent with the goal: make it possible to try an app without first solving “how do I fund this address” and “why is my wallet incompatible?”
The Sessions docs spell out the mechanism (intent message), the paymaster model, and the user protection fields (domain, token limits, expiry).The public Sessions repo ships SDKs and UI components (TypeScript + React hooks) explicitly aimed at making “sign once to log in” and gasless flows straightforward for builders.Fogo’s release notes show willingness to touch low-level validator internals (e.g., a validator memory-layout change that requires re-initializing config via fdctl), which is a tell that performance is being pursued at the plumbing level, not only via marketing promises.
Sessions don’t delete risk they relocate it. If builders default to broad domains, long expiries, or generous token limits, “convenience” becomes “a permission you forgot you gave.” Centralized paymasters add another trust and censorship surface: they can set policy, rate-limit, or fail under attack. And there’s a subtle UX risk: when users stop signing every action, they also stop noticing what’s happening so the UI has to communicate scope and limits clearly, or it’s just quieter risk.You’re a bot builder shipping a DCA + stop-loss tool on Fogo. The user signs one intent: only your program, only USDC and SOL, max 50 USDC/day, expires in 24 hours. Your backend submits the scheduled transactions via a paymaster, and the user gets the outcome they wanted—automation—without 20 wallet popups or “insufficient gas” failures.First adopters are apps where interruption is the product-killer: perps frontends, recurring swap tools, vault managers, and anything that wants “login-like” sessions instead of “sign-every-click.” Fogo wins if Sessions become boring infrastructure: conservative defaults, obvious revocation/expiry, and paymasters that can’t be farmed by spam. It fails if the ecosystem normalizes unlimited sessions, or if paymasters become a single choke point that breaks the moment usage gets real.
If you were launching on Fogo, would you enable paymaster gas by default: yes or no?
