Fogo launches high-speed blockchain mainnet after $7 million Binance token sale

Fogo, a new blockchain built using the Solana Virtual Machine, is launching its public mainnet on Thursday. 

Developed by former Wall Street executives with real-time trade execution in mind, the next-gen chain aims to achieve 40-millisecond block times, making it “up to 18x faster” than rival throughput-maxing networks like Solana and Sui. 

“Fogo represents a fundamental rethinking of blockchain infrastructure for trading applications,” the team wrote. “By combining SVM-level performance, innovative MEV mitigation, and lightning-fast finality, Fogo is positioned to become a preferred platform for decentralized exchanges, trading protocols, and financial applications requiring institutional-grade performance.”

Coinciding with the mainnet launch, “Fogo Flames” points holders can now convert their accumulated rewards into FOGO tokens. FOGO is “immediately tradable” on exchanges like Binance, OKX, Bybit, Bitget, Gate.io, MEXC, LBANK, and Backpack.

Last month, the team cancelled a planned pre-sale of 2% of the total supply with plans to instead airdrop the tokens and juice the points program, The Block reported at the time. That sale looked to raise $20 million at a $1 billion fully diluted valuation.

Ahead of Thursday's mainnet rollout, the Fogo Foundation disclosed a “strategic token sale” on Binance, offering 2% of FOGO tokens at a $350 million valuation, raising about $7 million to fund the foundation.

Fogo also raised a “community-first funding round” in January 2025 via Echo, the crowdfunding protocol created by Jordan Fish, better known as Cobie. The protocol raised $8 million in just under two hours from over 3,000 angel investors. It also raised a $5.5 million seed round.

The team launched a testnet in July 2025 that has consistently topped Chainspect's performance leaderboard, which ranks it as the fastest chain by TPS over the past 30 days. Chainspect data shows Fogo offers a max transaction-per-second metric of 136,866.

About 10 dapps are going live on the mainnet on Thursday, including a decentralized exchange called Valiant, a token launchpad Moonit, liquid staking protocol Brasa, and two lending protocols, Pyron and Fogolend.

“We designed Fogo to be user-first and to meaningfully involve the builders and traders who have been building with us from day one,” Doug Colkitt, co-founder of Fogo and former Citadel Securities researcher, said.