There’s a question the blockchain industry has largely avoided: when a network reaches extreme throughput, who actually pays for itand in what currency?
The answer isn’t fees.
It’s physics.
Fogo’s engineering approach forces this reality into the open. Built on a stripped-down SVM foundation, Fogo targets a 40-millisecond finality windowroughly the threshold of human perception. Below that, latency becomes effectively invisible. Above it, interfaces start to feel sluggish.
Fogo reaches this level of performance by removing much of the compatibility scaffolding that other networks have kept. Solana, for example, maintained certain design concessions to support broader hardware accessibility. Fogo treats many of those concessions as unnecessary.
The result is a parallel execution engine capable of saturating NVMe throughput but only if validators actually have NVMe throughput available.
And that’s the tradeoff: the IOPS demand under block pressure is real. Validators running mid-tier storage can suddenly fall behind the chain tip. This creates a core tension inside Fogo’s model: the performance numbers are real, but so are the hardware requirements needed to achieve them.
Comparing Fogo to Monad highlights two different philosophies for solving the same problem. Monad is essentially a rehabilitation project: it takes an existing execution model and retrofits it with modern parallelization and performance features. Fogo, on the other hand, optimizes directly for the architecture it’s built onnot the one it inherited. This gives Fogo the ability to move faster, but it also means its failure modes may be sharper and less forgiving.
One of Fogo’s most underappreciated design decisions is its local fee market isolation. By separating accounts based on access “temperature,” Fogo reduces the cascade failures that have historically plagued high-throughput chains. The tradeoff is that this changes liquidity topology making blockspace more predictable, but less fungible across the system.
Sui takes a different route through its object ownership model, resolving parallel conflicts at the data-structure level. This eliminates many write conflicts, but it still struggles when the state becomes globally contested. Fogo’s fee isolation doesn’t eliminate contention either but it does something arguably more important: it prices contention honestly and contains its blast radius.
What emerges from examining these designs is that high-performance chains aren’t just competing on raw speed they’re competing on how their bottlenecks behave.
A chain that degrades predictably is operationally manageable.
A chain that collapses suddenly is not.
Ultimately, the next generation of high-throughput networks will be defined by teams that understand latency not just between nodes on a map, but between their architecture and the hardware reality of the validators keeping the system alive.
