A fast VM is nice — but a fast chain that writes its own rules is the real upgrade.
Fogo’s public mainnet quietly went live on Jan 15, 2026 — and the design choices are the interesting part.
Instead of just copying an existing L1 playbook, Fogo is built around SVM compatibility + a Firedancer-style client and a multi-local (zone) consensus model.
The goal is simple: reduce coordination distance → reduce latency.
They’re targeting roughly ~40ms block times.
What stands out is what they didn’t postpone:
- Native price feeds are part of the base infrastructure
- Validators are optimized for performance first
- Latency is treated as a core protocol feature, not an afterthought
Most chains optimize decentralization first and try to scale later.
Fogo is doing the opposite: make the network physically fast first, then expand its economic surface.
Another signal: the launch followed a ~$7M strategic token sale via Binance, and the conversation around the project has already shifted from “can it work?” to “how far can they push throughput before new bottlenecks appear?”
The bigger question isn’t TPS anymore.
It’s this
If a chain gets block times close to real-world network latency, do we start designing apps differently?
What would you build on a ~40ms chain — trading infra, games, or something we haven’t thought of yet?