Original author: shushu
As Solana returns to the top, the SVM track has become very lively, with Eclipse and Sonic in the front, and SOON and Fogo in the back, all with well-known teams and investors behind them. Fogo, which recently announced the completion of two rounds of financing, has more than 3,000 angel investors on its investor list.
What is Fogo?
Fogo is a new SVM chain under development that enables on-chain “institutional-grade” financial services by combining the performance of traditional finance with decentralized infrastructure.
Fogo is currently in the developer network (devnet) stage and is said to have achieved more than 54,000 transactions per second. The test network is expected to be launched in the first quarter of this year, and the main network is expected to be launched in the second quarter.
Fogo has already begun to criticize the new public chain Monad, saying it is too slow. According to the white paper, Fogo has the following three characteristics:
1. Unified client implementation based on Firedancer: Through a high-performance client implemented purely in Firedancer, FOGO is able to achieve performance levels that other networks (including Solana) cannot achieve.
Firedancer is Jump Crypto’s high-performance Solana-compatible client implementation that demonstrates higher transaction processing throughput than current validator clients through optimized parallel processing, memory management, and SIMD instructions.
Firedancer has two versions: Frankendancer, a hybrid version that uses Firedancers processing engine and Rust validators network stack; and a full Firedancer implementation with a complete C network stack rewrite, currently in late development. Both versions maintain compatibility with the Solana protocol, and FOGO will first launch the network based on Frankendancer, and then gradually transition to pure Firedancer.
2. Multi-local consensus and dynamic co-location: Allowing verification nodes to coordinate their physical locations at different times while maintaining independent cryptographic identities in different regions, FOGO achieves block times and latencies far lower than other mainstream blockchains.
Multi-local consensus is inspired by the follow the sun trading model in traditional financial markets. In this model, market making and liquidity provision migrate between major financial centers as the trading day progresses, enabling continuous market operations while maintaining concentrated liquidity in specific geographic regions.
3. Selected set of validator nodes: Through a carefully selected set of validator nodes, FOGO incentivizes high-performance operations and prevents predatory behavior at the validator node level.
In the initial stage, the screening of the verification node set will be carried out through Proof-of-Authority, and then transition to direct management by the verification node set. By handing the screening authority to the verification node set, FOGO can punish abuse through the social layer without increasing the degree of centralization.
Can you trade without SOL? Fogos future expansion
In Fogos white paper, there is a chapter dedicated to Fogos future development plans. In order to expand network access and improve user experience, FOGO may introduce a fee_payer_unsigned transaction type that allows transactions to be executed without SOL in the initiating account. This feature, combined with the on-chain fee payment procedure, enables users to pay transaction fees with SPL tokens (such as TRUMP, MELANIA, or BARRON) while maintaining protocol security and verification node compensation.
Users construct transactions that contain their intended actions and SPL token payments to compensate the eventual fee payer. These transactions can be effectively signed without specifying a fee payer, allowing any party to complete a transaction by adding their signature and paying the SOL fee. This mechanism effectively decouples transaction authorization from fee payment, allowing accounts with zero balances to interact with the network as long as they have other valuable assets.
This functionality is implemented with minimal protocol changes, requiring only the addition of new transaction types and on-chain procedures to handle relay compensation. This system creates an efficient market for transaction relay services while maintaining the security properties of the underlying protocol. Unlike more complex fee abstraction systems, this approach does not require changes to validator payment mechanisms or consensus rules.
OG famous milk in the cryptocurrency circle, a new star in SVM with plenty of money
On January 25, SVM L1 Fogo raised $8 million in financing in less than two hours on Echo, an angel investment platform founded by Cobie, with a token valuation of $100 million. The Echonomist led the investment, with participation from 4 CMS Holdings, Big Brain Collective, and Patrons. Last month, Fogo just completed a $5.5 million seed round of financing, with Distributed Global leading the seed round with $5 million.
Robert Sagurton, co-founder of Fogo and former Jump Crypto executive, said in an interview that four Echo investment groups participated in this round of financing:
The Echonomist, led by Cobie, invested $6 million;
CMS Holdings’ 4 Ventures invested $1 million;
Big Brain Collective, led by The Block CEO Larry Cermak, invested $500,000;
and $500,000 from Patrons led by Synthetix and Infinex founder Kain Warwick.
At the same time, the background of Fogos founding team is closely related to Solana, cryptocurrency, and traditional finance.
According to Sagurton’s LinkedIn, he worked at Jump Crypto for more than five years, serving as the global head of digital asset sales and business consultant. Prior to joining Jump Crypto, Sagurton worked for enterprise blockchain company R3, JPMorgan Chase, State Street Bank, and Morgan Stanley.
The co-founder of Fogo is Douglas Colkitt, the founder of Crocodile Labs, who developed the decentralized trading platform protocol Ambient Finance (formerly known as CrocSwap). He also plans to deploy Ambient on Fogo.
