I didn’t start tracking FOGO because I needed another “fast SVM” headline. I started tracking it because of a quieter problem that usually shows up months after launch.
On most stacks, temporary assumptions slowly harden into interfaces. A bit of fee variance becomes a permanent buffer. A timing quirk becomes a retry rule. An ordering edge becomes a private policy. Nobody calls it a feature. It just happens because teams get tired of being surprised, and they’d rather ship folklore than ship uncertainty.
Once that happens, upgrades stop being engineering. They become negotiations. You are no longer changing a chain, you are breaking habits the ecosystem built to survive.
What made FOGO stand out to me is the hint that it wants fewer of those survival interfaces. Less room for “handle it in the app.” More pressure for acceptance and timing to stay boring enough that teams don’t have to encode paranoia into production code.
It’s like a train schedule. Speed is nice, but if arrivals drift, every commuter builds their own rules, and the station becomes the system.
That kind of discipline isn’t always fun to build against. But it tends to age better.