Fogo Chain Secures $8 Million at $100 Million Valuation, Targets Ultra-Fast Blockchain Launch in 2025
Fogo Chain, a high-performance layer-1 blockchain leveraging Solana’s Virtual Machine (SVM) and Jump Crypto’s Firedancer client, has raised $8 million at a $100 million valuation through a rapid community fundraising round on the Echo platform, led by prominent crypto figure Cobie. The round, completed in under two hours, saw participation from over 3,000 angel investors across four Echo groups, including The Echonomist (Cobie), 4 Ventures (CMS Holdings), Big Brain Collective (led by The Block CEO Larry Cermak), and Patrons (led by Synthetix and Infinex founder Kain Warwick).
This community round follows a $5.5 million seed round in December 2024, led by Distributed Global and CMS Holdings, bringing Fogo’s total funding to $13.5 million. The fundraising was structured as a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT) at a fully diluted valuation of $100 million. Notably, the community now owns a larger share of Fogo’s token supply than venture capitalists, a development Cobie described as a positive shift toward user-owned fundraising models in crypto.
Fogo Chain aims to deliver institutional-grade, real-time financial infrastructure, boasting sub-40ms block times and targeting transaction speeds of up to 1 million transactions per second (TPS). The chain’s multi-local consensus model and curated validator set are designed to minimize latency and support demanding applications such as decentralized finance (DeFi) and gaming.
Currently live on devnet, Fogo claims to have achieved over 54,000 TPS. The project plans to launch its public testnet in Q1 2025, followed by a mainnet launch in Q2 2025. The team intends to use the new funding to expand its development team, enhance blockchain capabilities, and grow its ecosystem.
Despite the excitement, some Solana developers have criticized Fogo for redeploying open-source code, raising questions about innovation versus iteration in the blockchain sector. In response to community engagement, Fogo has also introduced the “Fogo Flames” program, rewarding early contributors with points that could lead to future token airdrops.
With strong backing from tier-1 investors and broad community participation, Fogo Chain is positioning itself as a next-generation blockchain platform focused on speed, scalability, and institutional adoption.