Solana Firedancer: What You Need to Know
A Longterm Solution to Improve Solana's Scalability, Validator Performance & Resilience
Solana has been the target of some criticism and frustration lately, as the chain branded as ‘fast & cheap’ is not currently upholding these attributes. Some users are unable to use certain protocols or have to significantly raise their fees paid. While not necessarily connected but possibly correlated, MarginFi, the leading lending protocol on the chain, saw one of its Co-founders leave the protocol after expressing some frustrations with users and integrated protocols. It’s now been reported that a fix for the inherent issues that currently plague Solana is expected to go live on April 15th.
Today we’ll be briefing you on another fix that is in store for the Solana ecosystem; Solana Firedancer. Solana Firedancer is another Solana client being developed by Jump Crypto to help push toward the chain’s ‘Solana 2.0’ vision, which indeed will help to improve scalability and resilience.
Stay alert, stay informed ⬇
Key Points
Solana’s vision is hardware-centric, believing in linear scalability in line with Moore’s law, assuming software optimization keeps pace.
In its current state, existing validators face performance and scalability issues, mainly due to software limitations rather than hardware constraints.
Solana’s network resilience hinges on diversifying its validator clients to reduce systemic failure risks and enhance fault tolerance. The introduction of Firedancer, a new third-party validator client software, marks a move towards increasing this resilience, promoting client diversity, and addressing Solana’s dependency on limited clients.
The approach of Jump Crypto, the team behind Firedancer, is grounded in high-performance global trading systems – a match made in heaven to optimize Solana, ultimately aiming to operate at the edge of physical and theoretical limits.
While the development of Firedancer represents a significant milestone, continuous efforts in documentation, compatibility, and community governance are crucial for Solana’s evolution into an open standard.
Origins of Solana
The story of Solana begins in 2017 when Anatoly Yakovenko published the original whitepaper describing Proof of History. This set out the vision to build a blockchain that could overcome the scalability problems of existing solutions. It was designed as a high-performance, low-latency platform – a blockchain where you could build trading engines poised to rival the Nasdaq.
Based on the original idea laid out by Anatoly and the founding team, provided that software did not get in the way of hardware, the aggregate network performance of a blockchain could grow linearly with hardware advancements — as per Moore’s law and the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years with minimal rise in cost. Assuming optimal software, Solana’s performance metrics could double every two years without any further upgrades.
However, even if performance can scale with hardware advancements, efficient node communication is crucial to prevent network bandwidth from becoming a bottleneck, avoiding network slowdowns. This is critical to prevent any type of network slowdown, even with hardware advancements.
Background on Solana Firedancer
Current Solana validator clients have some limitations that can impact their performance and scalability, as well as network reliability, due to a lack of diversity. Most of these limitations are software-based, and not the results of constraints at the hardware level. Kevin J Bowers, a Jump High-Performance Systems researcher leading the efforts on Firedancer, is known for the infamous phrase “the speed of light is too slow”. Backed by decades of experience developing high-performance global trading systems, Jump seeks to improve the reliability of Solana by building an independent validator client called Firedancer.
Firedancer is not a short-term patch designed by just looking at the rearview mirror. It is meant to push the bounds of computing to offer scale and reliability, running at the edge of physical and theoretical limits.
Having another validator client like Firedancer is important for Solana as it enhances network resilience and performance. Diverse validator clients reduce the risk of systemic failures, as different clients may have varied responses to the same network issues.
Solana currently has ~1,649 validators, featuring one of the largest PoS networks by node count, as well as one of the most distributed, as measured by the Nakamoto Coefficient. The current validator clients on Solana are the Solana Labs client and the Jito Labs client, holding 68% and 32% of the active stake respectively. Even though the growth of the Jito Labs client has played a key role in diversifying the network during 2023, there is still work to be done.
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