Fogo raises $8 million at $100 million token valuation via Cobie's Echo in 'under two hours'

Fogo Foundation, the core contributor to the Fogo Chain — a new Solana Virtual Machine (SVM)-based Layer 1 blockchain — raised $8 million via Echo, the angel investor platform founded by popular crypto trader Jordan Fish, better known as Cobie.

Fogo raised the amount in "just under 2 hours" late Thursday, co-founder Robert Sagurton, a former Jump Crypto executive, told The Block.

A total of four Echo groups participated in the round: The Echonomist, led by Cobie, which invested $6 million; 4 Ventures by CMS Holdings, which invested $1 million; Big Brain Collective, led by The Block CEO Larry Cermak, which invested $500,000; and Patrons, led by Synthetix and Infinex founder Kain Warwick, which also invested $500,000, Sagurton said.

The Echo round was structured as a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFT) and conducted at a $100 million fully diluted token valuation — the same structure and valuation as the $5.5 million seed round last month, which is being disclosed today, Sagurton said. The seed round was led by Distributed Global, which invested $5 million, with participation from CMS Holdings, which contributed $500,000, Sagurton added.

With the Echo round, Fogo now has over 3,000 angel investors on its cap table. Cobie told The Block that Fogo is an "interesting" project and described the round as a unique deal on his platform.

"Fogo is interesting because the community, via Echo, actually owns more % supply of Fogo than VCs do. That hasn't happened before in a deal led by me at least. But it is a nice trend to be observing. Decentralized, community systems require a more user-owned fundraising model and I am happy that the Echo experiment is playing a small part," said Cobie. "Have a nice weekend," he added, before throwing in some unsolicited advice on TV shows.

What is Fogo?

Fogo is a new SVM chain under development. SVM is an execution framework that enables parallel transaction processing. Unlike Ethereum's Virtual Machine (EVM), which processes transactions sequentially, SVM executes multiple transactions simultaneously, achieving high transaction speeds and low costs.

"Solana has reached heights few ever predicted. We know, as we were supporters from the start," said Sagurton. However, he argued that Solana — which does leverage the SVM framework — has limits due to some of the tradeoffs it's made. Fogo "will give Nasdaq a run for its money, all while being respectfully decentralized with censorship resistance in mind," he claimed.

As for its tech stack, Fogo will run the Firedancer validator client "in its purest form to achieve real-time experiences at scale."

Firedancer is a high-performance validator client designed to drastically increase a blockchain's transaction processing capabilities. It is being developed by Jump Crypto, where Sagurton worked for over five years, first as global head of digital asset sales and later as a business advisor, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before Jump Crypto, Sagurton held roles at enterprise blockchain firm R3, JPMorgan, State Street and Morgan Stanley, per the profile.

Sagurton's co-founder at Fogo is Douglas Colkitt, the founder of Crocodile Labs — the creator of decentralized exchange protocol Ambient Finance (formerly CrocSwap). Sagurton said Colkitt plans to deploy Ambient on Fogo.

Fogo launch timeline

Currently in devnet, Fogo claims to have achieved over 54,000 transactions per second (TPS). The testnet is expected to launch in the first quarter of this year, with the mainnet following in the second quarter. Sagurton declined to comment on whether the Fogo token will launch alongside the mainnet.

With fresh funding, Fogo plans to grow its team, enhance its blockchain capabilities and support network and ecosystem growth initiatives.

Once live, Fogo promises to enable "institutional-grade" finance onchain by combining traditional finance performance with decentralized infrastructure.

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