I didn’t think much of Fogo until I tried porting something small over.
Not a full product. Just a module. I expected friction. New chains usually mean new assumptions, new quirks, some odd abstraction layer that forces you to rethink basics. That didn’t really happen here.
Because of the Solana Virtual Machine.
I’ve spent enough time around SVM environments to know the rhythm — parallel execution, account-level constraints, how state collisions behave. With Fogo, that rhythm felt intact. I didn’t have to translate mental models. That alone lowered resistance.
What I started paying attention to wasn’t raw speed. It was how execution behaved when I intentionally stressed it. How fees reacted. How consistent confirmation felt. High throughput is easy to claim. Predictability under load is harder.
Fogo isn’t trying to reinvent the runtime. That’s what makes it interesting to me. A lot of new L1s chase differentiation by building custom VMs. That sounds innovative, but it fragments tooling and developer familiarity. Fogo took a different route: anchor to something proven, then optimize around it.
That decision comes with pressure.
When you inherit SVM, you inherit comparison. If something slows down, people won’t shrug. They’ll benchmark. That’s a tough position for a young network, but it also signals confidence. You don’t choose a mature execution model unless you’re ready to be measured against it.
There’s also something practical here.
Developers don’t always want novelty. They want deployment. Familiar tooling shortens timelines. If I can reuse patterns I already understand, experimentation becomes practical instead of theoretical.
I’m not watching Fogo for headline TPS.
I’m watching for steadiness. If it can keep execution uneventful when real usage arrives — not just test traffic — that’s meaningful. Infrastructure shouldn’t feel dramatic. It should feel boring in the best way.
Speed grabs attention.
Consistency earns trust.