Finally, Solana Firedancer is bringing its much-hyped client to the forefront.
Kevin Bowers, Jump Trading’s chief scientist at Solana Breakpoint announced the news in the geekiest way possible. He pointed out to an audience of observers that a series of numbers on Solana mainnet indicating a new software version looked suspiciously different from Solana clients currently available. Applause followed.
Jump is developing Firedancer, an independent client for validators, which can be used to create the blockchain. Firedancer is a validator client that was developed independently from Solana Labs, and now uses C as the language of programming, rather than Rust.
The client is available in two different versions. Firedancer and Frankendancer. Firedancer has the full package. Frankendancer will be the first to launch and it is a piece-by-piece replacement of Agave, much like Frankenstein’s monster.
Frankendancer has been made live on mainnet and Firedancer on testnet. One person involved in the project said that a Firedancer upgrade is due tomorrow. However, they refused to give any further details.
Anatoly Yakovenko said that after Firedancer is released on the mainnet, Anatoly would be in favor of removing it. “beta” Solana – qualifier “mainnet-beta” status.
Multiple validator clients are important to a blockchain’s decentralization. (Jito technically has a different validator client but is very similar with the Agave Client.) If there is only one validator client, an error in the code may threaten Solana’s ability to be live. When there are multiple clients, a second client could step in to keep the blockchain going if the primary one is experiencing issues. Some have also argued that the only client limits validators’ ability to choose Agave’s design choices, unless forking the blockchain is done. This would be an extreme step. Helius CEO Mert mumtaz spoke with me about this in greater detail on the Lightspeed Podcast here.
Firedancer, besides being decentralized, is said to perform much better than Agave. In a testing environment, the developers of Firedancer have said that they were able to perform 1 million transactions every second. Solana Compass reports that Solana handles around 3,000 transactions per second, or fewer when you exclude votes and only include non-vote transaction involving users.
Dan Albert, the executive director at Solana Foundation said there are “audible gasps” Firedancer’s monitor GUI was displayed to a room full of validators. The performance of Firedancer will be the focus of tomorrow’s updates, if I were a gambler.
Jesse Brauner said in a message that it will be some time before the mainnet is reached, but even when this happens, users might not notice any difference.
Transacting “always happen fast and [users] won’t notice a millisecond level improvement,” Brauner writes.
Firedancer’s idea is becoming a reality. That’s exciting to see.
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