Firedancer is a from-scratch rewrite of Solana’s software being created by Chicago-based trading firm Jump. Firedancer would be Solana’s first true alternative client from the original built by Solana Labs, which is now known as Agave. With two clients, Solana would be protected from having a single point of failure on the client side — which can cause things like network downtime.
A limited version of the client, called Frankendancer because it combined chunks of the Agave client with Jump-written code like Frankenstein’s monster, went live in late 2024. Full Firedancer is live in non-voting mode. The participants in Firedancer’s delegation program are running Frankendancer.
Onchain data shows an account labeled as having been funded by Jump Crypto delegated roughly 20,000 $SOL to the approved validators. One validator, Watchtower, received over 1.2 million $SOL. In a Discord message, Solana Foundation validator relations lead Tim Garcia said a user named italo, who is associated with Watchtower, is running the delegation program for Firedancer.
The Firedancer delegation participants I spoke to had generally positive things to say about the client.
H2O Nodes noted that Frankendancer is more stable now than the original Solana client was when it started running a validator in 2022. Ian Unsworth from Kairos Research said the firm’s validator has been packing more compute units into blocks since switching to Frankendancer, which translates to incrementally higher rewards compared to the network average. RockawayX founder and CEO Viktor Fischer agreed — estimating that Frankendancer offers 10-15% higher performance when measured by average compute units.
blockworks.co
