Which F1 team have you seen that pits Ferrari against Wuling Hongguang, timing the slowest car for results?
This is the surreal reality of today's public blockchain space. Solana clearly has the Firedancer, a beast with a thousand horsepower, yet it still has to be dragged along by the old Rust client — consensus speed is determined by the slowest node; fast is fake, slow is real.
FOGO directly flipped the table.
From the very first day of its inception, it eliminated all other clients, enforcing a pure Firedancer for everyone. There is no 'compatibility and inclusiveness,' no 'multiple implementations.' You might think this is a regression? This is honesty about physical limits.
Multi-client has never been the holy grail of decentralization; it is a fig leaf for the performance era. Ethereum relies on diversity to avoid downtime, while FOGO faces high-frequency trading — a 40-millisecond latency is enough for NASDAQ to complete three settlements. On this battlefield, no one waits for you to drive a classic car.
The logic of FOGO is quite brutal: since the upper limit is determined by the weakest link, I will have no weak link. All validators use the same engine and the same tuning; whoever is slow gets eliminated. It’s not about governance votes pressuring you to upgrade; it’s about economic penalties telling you — if you can't run under 40ms, then don't take this job.
So, you ask me if FOGO is radical? Yes, it is.
But you ask those Solana builders who have been amazed by Firedancer's performance, yet dragged down by the mainnet to the point of cursing — they will only ask one thing: this job should have been done long ago.
After fifteen years of blockchain, finally someone says seriously: I do not aim to please everyone; I only serve those who truly need speed.
This is not arrogance. This is professionalism.
