I've been thinking about the hidden tax traders pay waiting for transactions to settle. Every on-chain trade leaves capital in limbo—Ethereum takes twelve minutes, "fast" chains still lag for seconds. During that window, prices slip, MEV bots strike, and money sits dead. I've calculated 2-5% annual bleed just to latency, often exceeding explicit fees.
L2s help throughput but inherit base-layer delays. Sidechains sacrifice security for speed. The trade-off feels false: wait forever or move fast and pray.
Fogo caught my attention by stopping the generic approach. They asked what traders actually need—sub-second certainty with proportional economic security, not theoretical maximums. Their design delivers deterministic finality under one second, parallel execution without bottlenecks, and sequencing that blocks frontrunning without slowing everything down.
The insight: trading needs fast, irreversible settlement with security matched to actual risk, not Bitcoin-treasury guarantees.
This changed how I view building. Vertical optimization beats accepting general-purpose limitations. "Sufficient security" wins when speed determines profitability.
Latency tax persists only while tolerated. Define "fast enough" and "secure enough" for specific domains—then engineer deliberately toward those specifications.