When people say “the mainnet RPC is public,” it can sound like a small technical update. But if you’ve ever shipped an app, you know what it really means: the chain just became part of someone else’s product. From this point on, Fogo isn’t judged by demos or claims. It’s judged by what happens when real users start clicking buttons and expecting things to work every single time.
Public RPC access is basically the moment the network stops being a place you test and becomes a place you depend on. It’s the difference between “we can connect” and “we can build habits here.” And habits are brutal. They don’t tolerate random timeouts, inconsistent responses, or that weird kind of lag where the chain is fine but the app feels broken because the infrastructure around it is wobbling.
The interesting part about Fogo is that this isn’t just “another chain opened an endpoint.” Fogo is trying to be a specific kind of environment: one where speed and responsiveness aren’t bragging rights, they’re the whole point. That changes the type of DeFi that makes sense to ship here. On slower networks, a lot of design flaws survive because delays hide them. On faster networks, the flaws show up early. Your assumptions about ordering, retries, visibility, and timing get tested in public.
This is where most developers get surprised: higher performance doesn’t only make good apps better. It also makes fragile apps fail harder. Anything that depends on precise timing—trading flows, liquidation paths, oracle updates, aggressive arbitrage—becomes sharper. If your system has even small edge cases, faster execution doesn’t forgive them. It exposes them.
Now layer in the part that actually makes Fogo feel different from a “fast VM with a new name.” It’s the push toward smoother interaction patterns—especially around sessions and fee sponsorship. If you want a DeFi app to feel normal to users, the friction is usually the same two things: paying fees all the time and signing everything. Fogo’s approach tries to reduce that, so users can move through an app without getting interrupted at every step.
That’s a big deal, but it’s not “free.” It shifts weight from the user to the application and its infrastructure. If your app sponsors fees or relies on delegated session behavior, then your reliability isn’t just “is the chain live.” It becomes “is our relay live, are our policies correct, is our funding logic safe, is our permission model clear, and do we fail gracefully when anything in that chain breaks.”
And this is where serious teams start thinking differently. Because once you remove repeated signatures and gas friction, you’re not just improving UX—you’re expanding the surface area you’re responsible for. You’re basically telling users, “Trust us to handle the messy parts.” If your limits and permissions are too loose, you’ve created an abuse target. If they’re too strict, the experience collapses back into friction. And if the user doesn’t understand what they agreed to, you’ve created the exact kind of quiet distrust that kills retention over time.
So when you say “developers can start shipping DeFi apps on Fogo today,” the real meaning is: developers can start shipping real products today, but only if they treat Fogo like a production dependency, not a playground.
That means making a few decisions early—decisions that people usually postpone until something breaks in front of users.
One is infrastructure: which endpoints you rely on, how you handle rate limits, what your fallback path looks like, how you monitor latency, and how you protect your user experience from the parts of the stack you don’t control. If you’re building anything high-touch—trading, perps-style flows, rapid rebalancing, liquidation engines—you don’t want to discover under load that your app “works” but feels unreliable.
Another is data freshness: if your app relies on fast-changing prices, you need to be obsessive about how quickly your oracle updates arrive and how you handle “almost fresh but not fresh enough.” Many of the worst DeFi incidents aren’t caused by one catastrophic bug. They’re caused by small timing gaps that become exploitable when markets move quickly.
And the third is permission design: if you’re leaning into session-style flows, you need to treat your permission envelope like a financial product. What can a delegated key do? For how long? With what limits? Across which programs? What happens if the browser is compromised? What happens if the user forgets they enabled something? Your best security work here isn’t just code-level—it’s clarity and restraint.
The calm way to summarize Fogo right now is this: it’s opening itself up at the exact layer where reality can’t be faked. Not a test environment. Not an invite-only experience. A public surface where anyone can build and anyone can stress it.
If Fogo succeeds, it won’t be because it’s “fast.” Lots of things are fast in controlled conditions. It’ll be because the network behaves predictably when it matters, and because the product primitives around it let developers build DeFi that feels smooth without quietly increasing risk.
And if it struggles, it won’t be because “people didn’t understand the tech.” It’ll be because speed amplifies everything—good and bad. It punishes sloppy assumptions. It punishes weak infrastructure. It punishes unclear permission models. The chain may be quick, but the ecosystem only becomes durable when the boring parts—reliability, limits, monitoring, policy—are treated as first-class engineering.
That’s what “public RPC” really unlocks on Fogo: not just access, but accountability.