The Innovative Finance Day at Fogo Fest 2025 brought together a powerful mix of industry leaders, including banks, exchanges, market makers, and protocol builders for an action-packed day of discourse. The agenda was centered on pivotal discussions around the Fogo ecosystem, the future of the trading experience, and broader financial innovation.
Robert Sags, Co-Founder Fogo, kicks things off by sounding the alarm on the rise of "Corpo chains," arguing that most current crypto projects aren't prepared for the scale of competition from giants like Google and Robinhood. He introduces Fogo as a hyper-optimized blockchain built from the ground up for institutional-grade finance.
Mike Cahill, Co-Founder & CEO Douro Labs, discusses Pyth and the massive $50 billion financial market data industry, explaining how its current structure of separate producers and distributors is inefficient and fragmented. He unveils Pyth's "farm to table" model, which sources data directly from the world's largest trading firms, and introduces Pyth Pro, a comprehensive subscription service designed to become the "Spotify of market data".
Austin Federa, Co-Founder DoubleZero Foundation, argues that the public internet is the fundamental bottleneck holding blockchains back, noting that it was never designed for the peer-to-peer demands of distributed systems. He presents double zero as a new parallel internet built on a base layer of physical fiber optic cables, designed to provide the dedicated, high-performance infrastructure needed to massively scale blockchains and move price discovery back onchain.
Rusty, Co-Founder Valiant, makes the bold declaration that DEXs will inevitably flip CEXs, and explains why Fogo's architecture is the key to making it happen. He details how Valiant is building a suite of products, including a creator-focused launchpad called Blaze, to provide fair, fast, and free finance for everyone on Fogo.
Scott Hague, Co-Founder & CEO FluxBeam, highlights the often-overlooked challenge of the "read layer," explaining that the current RPC stack doesn't scale for the high-throughput, low-latency environment of Fogo. To solve this, FluxBeam has completely rebuilt the RPC infrastructure from the ground up and is bringing its entire ecosystem of battle-tested trading tools and analytics over to Fogo.
Rachit Agarwa, Head of Global Exp Wormhole, discusses how tokenization represents the next evolution in crypto, with the potential to bring quadrillions of dollars from traditional markets like derivatives and insurance onchain. They position Wormhole as the essential interoperability layer that enables these tokenized assets and stablecoins to exist in a multichain world, allowing them to access liquidity and users across different ecosystems.
Siddharth Lalwani, Co-Founder & CEO Skate, opens by criticizing the current monolithic design of Web3 apps, where the same application must be rebuilt independently on each new chain. He introduces Skate's novel "stateless app" architecture, which uses a hub-and-spoke model to allow a single application to operate with a shared state across multiple, distinct blockchains like Solana and Fogo.
James Reilly, Head of Fogo Foundation, interviewed by Michael Powell, CMO Douro Labs, shares his extensive background in traditional finance and explains why Fogo's technical design was a "no-brainer" opportunity. He outlines the foundation's strategic, private-equity-style approach to partnerships and officially announces the Fogo Ecosystem Fund, created in partnership with Porterhouse Capital to invest in and support projects building on Fogo.
