Look, blockchains were never supposed to feel this painful to use.
That’s the thing people don’t talk about enough. Somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves that waiting, paying crazy fees, and watching transactions fail was just part of the deal. Like it was some noble sacrifice for decentralization. Honestly? Most users don’t care. They just want stuff to work.
That’s why projects like Fogo even exist in the first place.
I’ve seen this cycle before. New tech launches. Early adopters put up with the rough edges. Then normal people show up and say, “Why is this slow?” or “Why did this cost me $40?” And suddenly the old excuses don’t work anymore.
Blockchain’s at that point right now.
Back in the early days, Bitcoin didn’t care about speed. It cared about not breaking. And fair enough. Ethereum came along and said, “Cool, now let’s build apps.” That worked too. For a while. Then DeFi exploded. NFTs went wild. Everyone piled in at the same time. Fees went nuts. Networks choked. You’ve seen it. We all have.
That pain created demand. Real demand. Not marketing demand.
People wanted blockchains that didn’t feel like dial-up internet.
That’s where high-performance Layer 1s stepped in, and this is where the Solana Virtual Machine starts to matter. A lot.
Most blockchains process transactions one after another. Slow and safe. The Solana Virtual Machine said, “Why are we doing that if most transactions don’t even touch the same data?” So instead of forcing everything into a single line, it runs things in parallel when it can. Simple idea. Massive impact.
This isn’t just some nerd optimization. It changes what’s possible.
Fogo builds directly on that model. It doesn’t try to reinvent execution or pretend performance is something you bolt on later. Performance is the point. From day one.
And yeah, that’s a strong opinion. But I stand by it.
Because the thing is, users don’t experience consensus mechanisms. They experience clicks. Swaps. Transfers. Game actions. If those feel slow or expensive, you lose them. Period.
I’ve watched teams bend over backward trying to make apps usable on slow chains. Off-chain logic here. Batching tricks there. Weird UX compromises everywhere. It’s a real headache. High-performance Layer 1s like Fogo remove a lot of that nonsense. You can actually keep logic on-chain without punishing users.
That’s huge.
Take DeFi. Early DeFi was cool but clunky. Order books were a mess. High-frequency trading basically belonged to bots willing to pay insane fees. On a fast chain, suddenly things look different. Trades settle quickly. Fees stay predictable. Apps behave more like what users expect from modern finance. Not perfect. But way closer.
Payments are another one. Everyone loves to talk about crypto payments. Almost no one actually uses them daily. Why? Because waiting minutes and paying unpredictable fees feels ridiculous in 2026. On a network like Fogo, transactions are fast and cheap enough that payments stop feeling like a demo and start feeling… normal. And yeah, that’s kind of the whole goal.
Gaming is where this really clicks for me though. Games need responsiveness. You press a button, something should happen. Immediately. Slow blockchains ruin that. Developers end up pushing everything off-chain, which defeats the point. High throughput changes the math. More logic on-chain. Fewer hacks. Better gameplay. Still early. But promising.
Now, let’s be real. There are tradeoffs.
High-performance chains usually need beefier hardware. That scares people, and honestly, I get it. Validator centralization is a real concern. Anyone pretending otherwise is lying or coping. Decentralization isn’t binary though. It’s a spectrum. The industry’s still figuring out where the right balance is.
Parallel execution also isn’t trivial. Developers need to understand how state works or things break. I’ve seen teams mess this up. The learning curve is steeper. No way around that. But once devs get it, they don’t want to go back. I hear that over and over.
Another myth that won’t die is that speed means weak security. That’s lazy thinking. Security depends on incentives, consensus, and participation, not just how fast blocks move. Fast doesn’t mean reckless. It just means optimized.
Right now, the market’s shifting. Hype matters less. Users are impatient. Developers are tired of excuses. If your chain feels bad to use, people leave. No amount of ideology fixes that.
That’s why Fogo’s approach makes sense to me. It’s not trying to win philosophical debates. It’s trying to run well. To scale. To not fall apart when people actually show up.
Long term, this is where blockchain’s headed. Fewer chains. Better performance. UX that doesn’t scream “experimental tech.” If users don’t even notice they’re on a blockchain, that’s a win.
So yeah, Fogo isn’t just another Layer 1. It’s part of a bigger shift. Away from theory. Toward reality. Away from “someday it’ll scale” and toward “it works right now.”
And honestly? It’s about time.
