The blockchain industry rarely asks the uncomfortable question: when a network achieves extreme throughput, who actually pays for it — and in what currency?
The answer isn’t fees. It’s physics.
Fogo brings this reality to the surface. Built on a stripped-down SVM foundation inspired by Solana, Fogo targets ~40ms finality — a threshold close to human perceptual limits. Below that, latency becomes invisible. Above it, users feel friction.
Unlike Solana, which maintained broader hardware accessibility, Fogo removes compatibility scaffolding. Its parallel execution engine is designed to saturate NVMe throughput. But saturation requires capability. If validators lack high-performance NVMe storage, the IOPS demand under block pressure can push them behind the chain tip abruptly.
This is the core tension: the performance metrics are real — and so are the hardware requirements.
Comparing Fogo to Monad highlights two philosophies. Monad retrofits an existing execution model with improvements. Fogo optimizes aggressively for the architecture it has chosen. That enables speed — but also sharper failure modes.
Against Sui, the contrast is architectural. Sui resolves many conflicts at the data-structure level via object ownership, minimizing write contention but struggling with globally contested state. Fogo doesn’t eliminate contention — it isolates and prices it through local fee market segmentation, containing blast radius while sacrificing some fungibility of blockspace.
High-performance chains are no longer competing on raw TPS. They are competing on how their bottlenecks behave.
Predictable degradation is manageable. Sudden collapse is not.
The future belongs to teams that understand latency not just between nodes on a map, but between architecture and the physical hardware sustaining it.