Early Version of Long Awaited Firedancer Solana Validator Is on Mainnet

Jump Crypto, a Web3 infrastructure developer, reached a major milestone as an early version of its Firedancer Solana validator client, which has been dubbed “Frankendancer” launches on the Solana mainnet.

During his keynote speech at the Solana Breakpoint event in Singapore, Jump Crypto’s Chief Science Officer Kevin Bowers announced that Frankendancer is now live on the mainnet, while the Firedancer validator is now live on the testnet.

The Firedancer project, led by Jump Crypto, is designed to address Solana's scaling challenges. Jump Crypto has been working on it since 2022.

Frankendancer is a prototype of the full Firedancer validator, which is still under development and undergoing further testing on Solana’s testnet.

Following the Frankendancer upgrade announcement, Solana (SOL) has surged 7% in the last 24 hours, pushing it back above $150. Trading volume also saw a sharp increase, up by over 8%, as per CoinMarketCap data.

Solana has been plagued by performance bottlenecks and outages. Firedancer seeks to optimize hardware utilization and reduce software inefficiencies, pushing Solana’s performance to new heights.

Frankendancer, in its early stage, is a hybrid of Jump Crypto’s Firedancer technology and the Agave validator code. This dual configuration allows Jump to deliver improvements to the network immediately, even before the full Firedancer validator is ready for deployment.

Jump Crypto also said that Firedancer, which is written in C, adds an additional layer of security by diversifying the Solana network’s validator codebase, unlike the original Rust-based validator.

At the event, Bowers noted the significance of the new validator. “A second independent validator has benefits beyond performance, but performance is a prerequisite for reduced costs and increased capacity,” Bowers said. “We are working with the community in all these areas, and as we’ve shown in demos, Agave can hit current protocol caps as is.”

Decrypt reached out to Solana and Jump Crypto to seek comment on the Frankendancer mainnet launch, but did not immediately receive a response.

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire expressed his excitement about the development, tweeting, "This is an incredible milestone for our industry."

Jump Crypto reportedly aims to deliver a fully independent Firedancer validator by the end of 2024, boosting Solana's scalability, and performance capabilities.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.