Firedancer officially launches on Solana, aiming for a target of 1 million TPS

The Solana network has just become more robust. On Friday, the Solana Foundation announced Firedancer – a (client) validator developed over three years – has officially gone live.

If widely adopted, Firedancer, led by Jump Crypto, will help diversify Solana’s clients, thereby reducing the risk of network disruption due to software bugs, whether accidental or malicious.

This event also places Solana among the rare group of blockchains with multiple truly independent clients in use. Ethereum currently has about four main execution clients, while Bitcoin has dozens of different versions but still mainly revolves around Bitcoin Core.

A blockchain client is the software that validators run to connect and participate in the network, similar to how browsers like Chrome or Brave access the internet.

According to Jump Crypto, Firedancer has been running in production on several validators for approximately 100 days and was officially announced at the Breakpoint event in Abu Dhabi. Initially, the team planned to launch this client in Q2/2024.

Reducing Client Centralization Risks

For many years, the Solana ecosystem has almost solely revolved around two main clients, both derived from the original software of Solana Labs. These two clients are Agave, developed by Anza (split from Solana Labs), and Jito, built by Jito Labs, which at one point accounted for over 95% of validators on the network.

Jito’s Agave version, optimized for MEV transaction ordering and fee markets, at one point accounted for over 90% of total validator deployments. Both Agave and Jito-Agave are written in Rust.

Helius, an R&D company within the Solana ecosystem, has warned that relying almost entirely on a single client is a serious form of centralization, as a critical software bug could cause the entire network to halt.

The launch of Firedancer with a completely new codebase significantly reduces this risk for the multi-billion dollar network. Moreover, Firedancer is a complete rewrite from the original client, with many important upgrades.

Aiming for 1 Million Transactions Per Second

Jump Crypto began developing Firedancer in 2022 to address current performance limitations of the existing Solana client. Firedancer is written in C, focusing on maximizing modern hardware capabilities, bringing Solana closer to its goal of processing 1 million transactions per second (TPS).

Unlike Agave – which functions as a single-block application – Firedancer employs a modular “tile” architecture, allowing validator tasks to be separated and run in parallel, thus improving processing efficiency. Using C/C++ also enables this client to have lower-level hardware control, facilitating deep performance optimizations.

At Breakpoint 2024, Kevin Bowers, Chief Science Officer of Jump Trading Group, demonstrated Firedancer’s ability to handle over 1 million TPS on commodity hardware.

Earlier this year, a hybrid client named Frankendancer – combining components of Agave and Firedancer – was deployed in beta. This client quickly gained significant usage, with over 26% of validators operating it, indicating the potential acceptance of Firedancer in the future.

Future Upgrades for Solana

Firedancer is not the only improvement Jump Crypto is targeting for Solana. Last September, the Firedancer team proposed SIMD-0370, calling for the removal of the current block size limit, allowing blocks to expand flexibly according to the processing capacity of high-performance validators.

Solana celebrated its 5th anniversary in March this year. Meanwhile, developers are preparing for a major protocol upgrade called Alpenglow, aiming to reduce block finalization time to around 150 milliseconds and restructure Solana’s unique Proof-of-History consensus mechanism.