Solana developers are currently in the process of testing and perfecting a new validator client known as Solana Firedancer, which is meant to resolve a rather serious issue for the project.
The Firedancer’s origin can be traced back to February 2022, when the project’s blockchain went completely offline with no warning, and it remained off for almost 18 hours. Experts started looking into the matter, discovering that there was a flood of duplicate transactions that overwhelmed the chain’s validator network, uncovering a major flaw, which was the fact that the whole chain was running on a single software client.
With no backup software client to take on a portion of the work or kick in after the main one went down, the whole system collapsed. It exposed one of Solana’s greatest weaknesses — its client monoculture issue, which has since been recognized as its root vulnerability. More importantly, the outage caused a lot of frustration in the SOL ecosystem, as well as criticism of Solana’s stability. All of this led to the creation of a new validator client, Solana Firedancer, that was built from scratch, and aimed at resolving the monoculture problem.
What is Firedancer and Why It’s Different
So, what is Firedancer Solana? Simply put, it is a validator client — software used to keep the blockchain up and running. It is used by validators to check transactions, create new blocks, and ensure that the processed and stored information is synchronized between the nodes. Until recently, Solana used only a single client, which was the original version created by Solana Labs, known as Agave.
Agave has served Solana well for a time, but today, many believe that it is outdated due to the fact that it was written in Rust, and has a large codebase with tight coupling. As such, it can allow bugs to spread across the whole system’s core functions. Then,there is another client called Jito, which focuses on performance and Maximal Executable Value (MEV), but it was not built from scratch, so some of the old problems remain.
Firedancer is different from these two by being completely independent offrom any older software. It was written in C++, and it was built from scratch, as mentioned, enabling not only validator diversity but also offering a superior system. It was created by Jump Crypto, which is a company focused on high-frequency trading. Like most firms of this kind, Jump Crypto prioritizes nanosecond latencies, having a tight modular code, and overall, building systems that can remain reliable, even under stress.
In other words, Firedancer will take a new approach to how Solana’s tasks are performed, separating different aspects like networking, consensus, and execution, and ensuring that everything is done quickly while not depending on a single codebase.
Performance on Steroids: 1.2M TPS on Testnet
For the time being, the Solana Firedancer release date remains unknown, at least when it comes to its release on the mainnet. However, Firedancer was launched on the testnet a while ago, with extremely promising results. In fact, in late 2023, during internal testing, Firedancer stunned the project’s community by exceeding 1.2 million TPS, completely dwarfing the current mainnet capabilities which can only go up to 65,000 TPS.
The developers conducted careful testing to make sure that the results are reliable, structuring it in several phases. They conducted replay tests, during which they fed historical Solana traffic into Firedancer to see how it would perform and validate whether the results are correct. They also conducted stress tests, pushing raw throughput limits with artificially generated load, and they used parallel pipeline benchmarks to analyze how far the modular C++ code could scale across CPU cores.
However, while Solana Firedancer’s progress in 2025 is extremely promising, users should keep in mind that the testnet results will not be the same as the mainnet performance, once Firedancer finally goes live. The 1.2 million TPS will be reduced in real conditions due to other factors that will impact the network outside of the tightly controlled testnet environment, such as latency, bandwidth bottlenecks, hardware issues, and alike.
Even so, Solana’s performance will still be much greater than it is today, so even if it doesn’t achieve testnet figures, it will still significantly improve the network.
Will It Actually Prevent Another Outage?
The big question is whether Firedancer can stop another outage from happening, and right now, the results look promising. The new client was built to deliver more than just speed — it will also make Solana more resilient. The 2022 outage exposed client monoculture as the real problem in the network, as all validators were running the same codebase from Solana Labs at that time.
So, when a bug in the runtime hit, it immediately spread throughout the network, knocking down the entire system. Firedancer will address this issue by offering a completely independent implementation, meaning that if one client ends up having a bug, the others will not follow.
Furthermore, Solana will roll out the new client in phases, with Frankedancer being the first one. This is a partial implementation that will start slowly by only handling a handful of tasks, while Agave will still do most of the work. Later, once Frankedancer settles in, the developers will roll out the full version of the client, allowing Firedancer to take over all validator responsibilities.
The new client will also bring greater decentralization by fixing Solana’s high entry barrier to becoming a validator. Right now, the entire blockchain only has around 2,000 validators, while Firedancer’s technology will allow more operators to launch their own nodes, pushing the ecosystem past 1,000+ validator diversity.
Why Firedancer Still Can’t Run at Full Speed (Yet)
Despite its testnet success, Firedancer still cannot simply plug into Solana and start hitting new records immediately. The reason is that all validator clients, regardless of which one is in use, must be in perfect sync. In other words, clients can’t be allowed to start outpacing one another, or they will break the consensus.
This is something that Douglas Colkitt’s alternative network Fogo comes in. Think of Fogo as a custom chain that was specifically designed to test Firedancer and its limits, created to see how far the new client can really get. It is another chain for testing, but with an important distinction — all limitations are removed, and the devs are allowed to push the Firedancer architecture as far as hardware would allow it.
This exposed a tradeoff between decentralization and speed. Mainly, a client can be optimised to be fast, but if everyone uses it, the network will go back to the monoculture issue. Alternatively, introducing multiple clients will bring greater diversity, but it will also slow things down to maintain compatibility and ensure that all clients operate properly together.
Firedancer After Solana: Is There a Greater Future?
Firedancer was created as a client for Solana. However, after discovering its potential, many in the community have started speculating what would happen if a new blockchain was built to suit Firedancer, rather than using it on an existing chain.
Fogo is one example of this, allowing Firedancer to run without Solana’s legacy constraints, and the results are already quite impressive. Without being held back by Agave or Jito, the network can reach its limits. This would not be a replacement network for Solana, but potentially a first look at what next-gen Firedancer-based chain could look like.
Another example is Hyperliquid, which is another high-performance DEX project that also uses a more aggressive approach to infrastructure. It is not tied to Firedancer directly, but it has similar goals of creating faster chains with high-frequency DeFi. This means that Firedancer could become much more than a new validator client for Solana, and evolve into something bigger, although not yet.
What to Watch in 2025-2026
Moving forward, there should be several major developments in the next two years, or so. Primarily, the community will determine if Firedancer will be a success or not.
Other than that, Frankedancer is expected to see gradual adoption throughout 2025, with some core systems, such as vote-signing and packet-processing going live first. Later this year, and in early 2026, Firedancer should be rolled out in full. It will have to go through security audits, stress testing, ecosystem support, and the like, but if that goes smoothly, it should be ready for implementation over the next six months or so.
Again, it won’t become a default client right away, but it will gradually take over more and more processes until it eventually does. Right now, both developers and institutions are keeping a close eye on its progress, as their interest continues to grow.
Glossary
- Solana blockchain — A high-performance blockchain known for fast transfer speeds and low fees.
- Proof-of-Stake (PoS) — A consensus mechanism where validators are selected to produce blocks based on the amount of crypto they stake.
- Proof-of-History (PoH) — A cryptographic clock used by Solana to timestamp transactions before consensus, which allows validators to process data simultaneously and efficiently.
- TPS (Transactions Per Second) — The number of transactions that a blockchain can handle each second.
- High-Frequency Trading (HFT) — A form of algorithmic trading where systems execute thousands of trades in a fraction of a second.
- Fogo — An experimental blockchain created to explore the limits of Firedancer’s speed and scalability
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