I didn’t pay much attention to Fogo the first time I heard about it. Another “high performance L1” isn’t exactly rare in 2026. Speed, low latency, parallel execution I’ve seen those bullet points recycled so many times they barely register anymore. Most new chains feel like narrative experiments first and infrastructure second.
What made me pause with Fogo wasn’t the branding or the token story. It was the architectural choice: building directly on the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). Not “inspired by Solana,” not “compatible with Solana tooling,” but actually committing to the same execution model. That’s a much more opinionated bet than people realize.
Because SVM isn’t just a faster EVM. It’s a fundamentally different way of thinking about how blockchains process work.
Why SVM actually matters (beyond marketing)
The usual pitch for SVM is parallel execution. And yes, that’s real. Unlike the sequential execution model most chains inherited from Ethereum, SVM allows multiple transactions to run simultaneously as long as they don’t touch the same state. In theory, that’s how you get real throughput without relying on rollups or off-chain batching.
But the more important part, in my view, is deterministic performance.
On most blockchains, performance degrades under load in unpredictable ways. Gas spikes, mempools clog, latency becomes erratic. On SVM-style systems, throughput scales more linearly with hardware. If the network has more cores, more memory, better scheduling, it can actually process more real work. That’s not just a UX improvement it changes what kinds of applications are even feasible.
High-frequency trading.
On-chain games with real-time state.
Orderbooks instead of AMMs.
Financial apps that care about milliseconds, not just block inclusion.
These aren’t things you can bolt on later. They’re architectural outcomes.
Fogo’s decision to go all-in on SVM suggests they’re targeting that category of use cases not just “DeFi, but cheaper,” but systems that assume performance as a baseline, not a luxury.
Rust is underrated as a strategic choice
Another detail that doesn’t get enough attention: Rust smart contracts.
This isn’t about developer preference. Rust enforces a different mental model than Solidity. It’s stricter, more explicit about memory, more painful at first but also much harder to write sloppy code in.
That matters if you’re building infrastructure meant to handle serious load and real capital. Not experimental yield farms, but systems that look more like traditional backend services, just on chain.
Rust pushes developers toward:
• deterministic logic
• explicit state management
• performance-aware design
In other words, it aligns with the same philosophy as SVM itself: treat the blockchain like a real execution environment, not a toy scripting layer.
The tradeoff, obviously, is accessibility. Solidity has ten years of tutorials, copy paste patterns, and an army of devs who can ship something in a weekend. Rust has a steeper learning curve and far fewer casual builders.
So Fogo is implicitly choosing fewer, more serious developers over mass experimentation. That’s not necessarily wrong but it does narrow the funnel.
Ecosystem composability: the quiet advantage
One thing I think people underestimate about SVM-based chains is composability across the Solana ecosystem.
If you build on SVM, you’re not starting from zero. You’re inheriting:
• token standards
• wallet compatibility
• tooling patterns
• program architecture assumptions
That creates a kind of latent network effect. Even if Fogo is small today, it’s structurally aligned with a much larger ecosystem.
In theory, a Solana-native team can spin up on Fogo with minimal conceptual overhead. The same mental models apply. The same performance assumptions hold. The same design space exists.
That’s very different from most new L1s, which require developers to learn an entirely new execution model for marginal improvements in fees or throughput.
So from a purely technical standpoint, Fogo’s approach makes sense: don’t invent a new paradigm, just scale an existing one more aggressively.
The uncomfortable question: is infrastructure enough?
Here’s where my skepticism kicks in.
High performance infrastructure is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. We’ve already seen this play out with multiple chains that had superior tech and zero gravity.
The real question isn’t:
“Can Fogo process millions of transactions per second?”
It’s:
“Who actually needs that, and why would they choose Fogo specifically?”
Performance only matters if there are applications that:
1. genuinely require it, and
2. can’t get it somewhere else.
Right now, most on chain activity still looks like:
• speculative trading
• token launches
• liquidity games
• governance theater
None of these actually need SVM level performance. They benefit from it, sure but they don’t depend on it.
So Fogo is implicitly betting on a future demand curve that doesn’t fully exist yet: real-time finance, on-chain gaming, machine-to-machine systems, autonomous agents, high-frequency protocols.
That’s a reasonable bet. But it’s still a bet.
Scalability isn’t just throughput
Another thing I’m cautious about: people equate scalability with raw TPS. That’s a narrow definition.
Real scalability includes:
• state growth
• validator economics
• hardware centralization
• long-term storage costs
• governance under stress
SVM systems tend to push toward high-performance hardware. That’s great for execution, but it raises questions about decentralization. If running a validator requires serious infrastructure, the network naturally concentrates around well-funded operators.
That doesn’t mean it’s doomed but it does mean Fogo’s scalability story is tightly coupled to its validator model. And that’s usually where idealized benchmarks collide with real-world economics.
High throughput is easy in controlled environments.
Sustainable, decentralized high throughput is much harder.
Adoption is the real bottleneck
What I’m most curious about with Fogo isn’t the tech it’s the demand side.
Who are the actual users?
Not token holders.
Not speculators.
Not “potential partners.”
Real users who rely on the chain for something they couldn’t do elsewhere.
If Fogo ends up hosting:
• serious trading infrastructure
• real-time financial systems
• high-performance games with real player bases
• applications that break under EVM constraints
Then the SVM bet looks brilliant.
If it mostly hosts:
• forks of existing DeFi apps
• low-volume experiments
• narrative-driven projects chasing incentives
Then the architecture becomes overkill. Impressive, but underutilized.
And that’s the quiet risk with infrastructure first chains: they can be technically correct and strategically early at the same time.
Why I’m still watching
Despite the skepticism, I find Fogo more interesting than most new L1s.
Not because I think it’s guaranteed to win but because it’s making a coherent architectural argument instead of a marketing one.
The thesis seems to be:
If blockchains are going to compete with real systems, they need real execution models.
Not cheaper gas.
Not better memes.
Not prettier dashboards.
Actual compute.
Actual performance.
Actual developer discipline.
That’s a harder path. It attracts fewer tourists and more engineers. It’s slower to show traction, but potentially more durable if it works.
The open question is whether the market is actually ready for that kind of chain or whether we’re still in a phase where infrastructure keeps outpacing real demand.
My current take
Fogo feels less like a product and more like a positioning statement.
A bet that the next phase of crypto isn’t about financial primitives, but about computational primitives.
A bet that on chain systems will start to look more like distributed backends than financial casinos.
A bet that performance will eventually matter more than narrative.
I don’t know if that future arrives on Fogo specifically.
I don’t know if the ecosystem forms fast enough.
I don’t know if decentralization holds under real load.
But at least the question it’s asking feels real.
Not:
“How do we attract liquidity?”
But:
“What would a blockchain look like if we treated execution as the core product?”
That’s a more interesting problem than most L1s are trying to solve. And even if Fogo doesn’t end up being the answer, it’s at least operating in the right layer of the stack infrastructure, not illusion.