Ape-tizers:

• Fogo is a layer-1 blockchain that aims to solve the latency, throughput, and congestion issues that plague the current blockchain ecosystem.
• Fogo is looking to change the game by utilizing Firedancer, along with a novel, co-located, canonical client design, curated validator set, multi-local consensus, and full SVM compatibility.
• With mainnet due to launch in Q3 2025, things could get very interesting.

In the world of finance, speed is king.

Since the early days of trading, those who had the information first made all the money.

Long before the days of turning notifications on for your favorite KOL grifter and waiting for the contract address (only to get some half-ass cryptic message or a chart with no ticker), they had pigeons, ticker tape, and hand-written notes that would be passed around the trading floors.

Then, the tech advanced and high-frequency trading (HFT) began to rise to prominence.

Lighting-fast fiber-optic cables replaced carrier pigeons, and suddenly what used to take days turned into seconds, seconds turned to milliseconds, and milliseconds became microseconds.

In comparison to the world of traditional finance, our trusty blockchain tech is still pretty damn slow.

If we look at the most popular blockchains and their rate of real-time transactions-per-second (TPS), things start to look pretty primitive compared to what NASDAQ or VISA can do.

Bitcoin TPS = ~7.5

Ethereum TPS = ~16.5

Solana TPS = ~882.3

Vs:

VISA TPS = 24,000

NASDAQ TPS = 100,000

Now before you start crying out that the numbers above are not correct, they are the “real time” TPS which is calculated by looking at the total amount of real transactions within a variety of time periods and dividing them by the number of seconds within that time period.

It’s all well and good to be some smelly garbage-pile of a blockchain that claims to pump out 10,000 TPS speeds, but when we look at the real-time metrics, they are only doing a measly 5.

Admittedly, this is because there is literally nobody using it, but what is a blockchain without any users anyway? Theory is one thing, facts are another.

So far, Solana is pretty much the fastest, high-usage blockchain we have. This sits well for the end-game goal of becoming the crypto version of NASDAQ, but there is still a long way to go.

There is, however, a new kid on the block.

Fogo aims to close this speed gap between the world of internet beans and the boomer markets.

Looking at their tech stack a little closer, they might just pull it off.

What is Fogo?

Fogo is a layer-1 blockchain that aims to solve the latency, throughput, and congestion issues that plague our beloved Solana chain today.

By utilizing Jump Crypto’s high-performance Solana client, Firedancer, along with a novel, co-located, canonical client design, curated validator set, multi-local consensus, and full Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) compatibility, Fogo aims to change the game.

This speed edge opens the door for a huge amount of TradFi-like speed applications that could really put NASDAQ on-chain one day.

Not only this, but it will enable us degenerates to run our portfolios to zero at an even more rapid rate, something many of us never thought possible.

How does Fogo work?

In order to understand this tech stack in full and see how it differs from Solana, let’s break down the crypto jargon above into its individual components and see how it all works under the hood.

Firedancer

Jump Trading Group has been building high-speed, low-latency trading infrastructure over the past 20 years.

Their crypto arm, Jump Crypto, has recently turned its attention to Solana to bring these decades of global network building to the world of blockchain.

The aim of the Firedancer game is to replicate the functionality of Solana but with even higher performance. By doing so, they will eliminate the software limitations and create a network that is only restricted by the hardware itself.

At present, Firedancer is in the “Frankendancer” stage. For context, Frankendancer is C-programming-based. Only some bits, i.e. the parts that haven't been ported yet, are temporarily hooked into the Rust-based Agave validator.

Firedancer itself is in its late stage of development and will be 100% written in the C programming language.

Fogo will be built upon this Frankendancer code base to begin with and will then move over to Firedancer as soon as it goes live.

According to the Firedancer docs, blistering speeds of up to 278,380 TPS have been achieved with the correct set-up parameters in place.

This is obviously not the real-time TPS, which won’t be seen until the tech goes live, but considering that Solana has a maximum theoretical TPS of around 65,000, the speed that can be achieved with the Firedancer client in place will likely be mind-blowing.

Current speed tests on the Fogo website sit in the 40,000 to 45,000 TPS range with 200 to 20 millisecond block times.

It is worth noting that even once Firedancer goes live, there is a chance that Solana itself will actually be slowed down by validators that will still be running on the current Solana clients.

Fogo, on the other hand, will be a pure Firedancer chain and therefore will immediately reap the full speed benefits from this new tech upgrade.

For the latest going-ons with the Firedancer upgrade, check out their GitHub.

Co-located, canonical clients

Ah yes, some good old-fashioned crypto fugazi slang that sounds 10x more complicated than it actually is, but is pretty cool to say to your sub-50 IQ mates in the Discord chat.

We’ll keep this one short and simple.

Basically, this refers to Fogo’s infrastructure that forces validators to actively seek out the highest performing clients on the network and does so by using classic economic incentives.

Use a slow client and risk missing blocks, which can result in penalties and revenue loss for the validator.

This creates a survival of the fittest scenario in which only the fast survive, and it ties in nicely to the next part of the Fogo tech stack.

Multi-local consensus

The easiest way to get our shitcoin-rotted brains around multi-local consensus is to bring it back to the subject of high-frequency TradFi trading (HFT).

It may come as a surprise to some, but if you are involved in the world of HFT then your location makes a big difference.

Traders who are based in, say, Los Angeles, will have slower execution times than those who are based in New York. This is due to the proximity to the stock markets central servers which are based in the Big Apple.

Basically, the further that data has to travel, the longer it takes to arrive.

The same concept applies to blockchains and is something that is seldom talked about.

Fogo will use geographically based zones and a cryptographically protected zone rotation mechanism that will allow validators to massively reduce latency by co-locating.

By doing so, latency on the Fogo network will be reduced to only the constraints of the hardware itself.

These zones can be rotated into at specific times.

For example, if JPow is set to speak tomorrow and tell the world that the printers will begin to brrrr and rates will be nuked to zero, then validators can choose to locate consensus in zones closest to the source of the information.

In other words, Jannet Yellen's basement.

This is actually pretty awesome stuff, and it means that run-of-the-mill tasks can be performed wherever, while important zone-specific tasks can be targeted to the nearest zones for peak performance.

In the case of zone-specific consensus failure, Fogo can fall back into its default global-consensus mode that is the current standard for most blockchains today.

This fallback mechanism will only be triggered if a zone fails to reach block finality within its designated timeout period, or if validators cannot reach consensus on the next zone to be used.

Curated validator sets

One bad egg can ruin the entire recipe, and blockchain validation is no different.

Fogo will utilize a curated validator set that will punish bad validators that prevent the network from reaching its full potential.

Initially, this curation will operate via a proof-of-authority mechanism that generally relies on identity and reputation rather than computational work to sort the good from the bad and the ugly.

This obviously raises some centralization concerns, but Fogo claims that it is no more centralized than the current fork power that already exists in traditional proof-of-stake networks like Solana.

Fogo will aim to have 20-50 validators on the network initially, with this number increasing as the network matures.

SVM compatibility

Being built with Firedancer tech, Fogo will be fully SVM compatible.

This means that any applications that currently exist on the Solana network can seamlessly migrate across to the Fogo chain and start operating there from day 1.

This opens the door to many higher performance DeFi tasks to be undertaken by the current basket of top notch protocols that already exist on Solana.

Once Fogo goes live it won’t come as a surprise to see top protocols like Drift, Kamino, Jito, Jupiter, Raydium, as well as wallet providers like Phantom begin to migrate over to the network and start cooking up high-performance use cases of their own.

Fogo Flames program

If you want a piece of the Fogo action then the Flames program is the place to check it all out.

Flame points can be accumulated in a number of ways.

Firstly, you can earn Flames by staking Pyth tokens through Oracle Integrity Staking.

Second up, you can earn Flames by trading tokens or depositing into liquidity pools on Ambient Finance.

You can also put your social skills to the test and become a standout chad in the Fogo Discord channel or become the ultimate retweeting, reply guy on the Fogo X account to get your hands on more Flames points.

Flames are distributed on a weekly basis, and a real-time leaderboard can be seen on the Fogo website.

For more Flame info, check out the blog post here.  Note: Season 1 has ended now.

Closing thoughts on Fogo

If crypto really is going to eat the world of finance, then things will have to be faster.

The current block speeds and transaction times just aren’t going to cut the cake with the best HFT firms in the TradFi world.

Thanks to the upcoming release of Firedancer, Fogo seems to think they have a solution and it's hard to argue against the tech they plan to roll out.

The team is also pretty stacked.

Co-founder Robert Sagurton has spent 5 years grinding it out at Jump Crypto and used to work for multiple large institutions like JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and State Street Bank.

Douglas Colkitt, also co-founder, built Ambient Finance, so he certainly knows a thing or two about the inner workings of protocols associated to our magic internet beans.

And Micheal Cahill just so happens to be CEO of Pyth Network and was at one time the Vice President of Foreign Exchange Business at Morgan Stanley, as well as working at Jump Crypto for the past four or so years.

If you’re a venture gambler who is well aware that betting on tech start-ups is generally a bet on the team themselves then Fogo ticks a lot of boxes.

Fogo’s $13.5 million in raises over two funding rounds certainly speaks volumes to this fact.

A seed round back in December 2024 saw $5.5 million thrown on the table and the January 2025 ICO round saw another $8 million raised with contributions from some of the biggest players in the space.

With mainnet due to launch in Q3 2025, things could get very interesting.

It will be even more interesting to see if Fogo can manage to steal away some of the domination in mindshare and usage that Solana has experienced so far this cycle.

“Infrastructure that follows the sun” is the Fogo motto, one can only hope they don’t pull an Icarus by flying too close, for it seems like we’re on the brink of some seriously ground-breaking performance upgrades.