This paper introduces Fogo, a novel layer 1 blockchain protocol delivering breakthrough performance in throughput, latency, and congestion management. As an extension of the Solana protocol, Fogo maintains full compatibility at the SVM execution layer, allowing existing Solana programs, tooling, and infrastructure to migrate seamlessly while achieving significantly higher performance and lower latency.
Fogo contributes three novel innovations:
These innovations deliver substantial performance gains while preserving the decentralization and robustness essential to a layer 1 blockchain.
Blockchain networks face an ongoing challenge in balancing performance with decentralization and security. Today's blockchains suffer severe throughput limitations that make them unsuitable for global financial activity. Ethereum processes fewer than 50 transactions per second (TPS) on its base layer. Even the most centralized layer 2s handle less than 1,000 TPS. While Solana was designed for higher performance, limitations from client diversity currently cause congestion at 5,000 TPS. In contrast, traditional financial systems like NASDAQ, CME, and Eurex regularly process over 100,000 operations per second.
Latency presents another critical limitation for decentralized blockchain protocols. In financial markets—especially for price discovery on volatile assets—low latency is essential for market quality and liquidity. Traditional market participants operate with end-to-end latencies at millisecond or sub-millisecond scales. These speeds are only achievable when market participants can co-locate with the execution environment due to the speed of light constraints.
Traditional blockchain architectures use globally distributed validator sets that operate without geographic awareness, creating fundamental performance limitations. The speed of light and network infrastructure impose unavoidable round-trip latencies between regions—180ms between London and Singapore, 220ms between New York and Tokyo, and 160ms between Sydney and San Francisco. These inter-regional latencies compound when consensus requires multiple communication rounds between validators. As a result, networks must implement conservative block times and finality delays to maintain stability. Even under optimal conditions, a globally distributed consensus mechanism cannot overcome these basic networking delays.
As blockchains integrate further with the global financial system, users will demand performance comparable to today's centralized systems. Without careful design, meeting these demands could significantly compromise blockchain networks' decentralization and resilience. To address this challenge, we propose the Fogo layer one blockchain. Fogo's core philosophy is to maximize throughput and minimize latency through two key approaches: first, using the most performant client software on an optimally decentralized validator set; and second, embracing co-located consensus while preserving most of the decentralization benefits of global consensus.
The paper is broken down into sections covering the major design decisions around Fogo. Section 3 covers the relationship of Fogo to the Solana blockchain protocol and its strategy with regards to client optimization and diversity. Section 4 covers multi-local consensus, its practical implementation, and the tradeoffs it makes relative to global or local consensus. Section 5 covers how the Fogo’s approach to initializing and maintaining the validator set.
At a base layer Fogo starts by building on top of the most performant widely used blockchain protocol to date, Solana. The Solana network already comes with numerous optimization solutions, both in terms of protocol design and client implementations. Fogo targets maximum possible backwards compatibility with Solana, including full compatibility at the SVM execution layer and close compatibility with TowerBFT consensus, Turbine block propagation, Solana leader rotation and all other major components of the networking and consensus layers. This compatibility allows Fogo to easily integrate and deploy existing programs, tooling and infrastructure from the Solana ecosystem; as well as benefit from continuous upstream improvements in Solana.
However unlike Solana, Fogo will run with a single canonical client. This canonical client will be the highest performance major client running on Solana. This allows Fogo to achieve significantly higher performance because the network will always run at the speed of the fastest client. Whereas Solana, limited by client diversity will always be bottlenecked by the speed of the slowest client. For now and the foreseeable future this canonical client will be based off the Firedancer stack.
Firedancer is Jump Crypto's high-performance Solana-compatible client implementation, showing substantially higher transaction processing throughput than current validator clients through optimized parallel processing, memory management, and SIMD instructions.
Two versions exist: "Frankendancer," a hybrid using Firedancer's processing engine with the rust validator's networking stack, and the full Firedancer implementation with a complete C networking stack rewrite, currently in late-stage development.