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Fogo Crypto (FOGO) started out as a niche “DeFi-first” idea, but it didn’t stay that way for long. Pretty quickly, it transformed into a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain built on the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM). This shift wasn’t just about the tech—it was also about aiming for “institutional-grade” speed and bringing the community in closer.
So, how did it all get off the ground? The project was co-founded by folks who’d spent time at Jump Crypto, Morgan Stanley, and Citadel Securities. They kicked things off with a $5.5 million seed round led by Distributed Global, then followed it up with an $8 million community round on Cobie’s Echo platform in January 2025. From the start, Fogo was built around the Firedancer validator client—originally made for Solana—to push block times faster than anyone had seen.
The real test came in 2025. Fogo rolled out a “Phase 0” testnet on March 31, then opened things up to the public in July. During these phases, the network consistently hit over 100,000 transactions per second and kept block times under 40 milliseconds—blowing past the likes of Solana and Sui. And instead of letting just anyone run a validator, Fogo used a handpicked set to make sure the hardware didn’t slow anything down.
But the biggest change came on the community side. Fogo moved away from the typical VC-heavy model, giving more power to actual users. In late 2025, the team scrapped a planned $20 million token presale and decided to airdrop those tokens straight to their community. They also launched the Fogo Flames program, which gamified loyalty: users earned points for helping out on the testnet, using dApps like Valiant or Brasa, and staying active in the ecosystem. Those points could then be swapped for FOGO tokens when the mainnet went live in January 2026.
Mainnet launch day—January 15, 2026—marked the official start of Fogo’s production phase. They didn’t just flip the switch and walk away, either. The launch included a $7 million token sale on Binance and more than 10 dApps already up and running, with Valiant DEX and the Moonit launchpad leading the charge.