Solana’s Firedancer Client Builds First Block on Testnet

Jump Crypto’s Firedancer achieved a key milestone on the testnet. The high-performance Solana validator client has been in the works since 2022.

Firedancer, a new validator client for the Solana blockchain developed by Jump Crypto, successfully built its first accepted block on the Solana testnet on Wednesday.

The high-performance validator client, which is written in C++, is designed to enhance Solana’s transaction processing capabilities significantly. It introduces sharding support, which can dramatically increase the network’s throughput. 

“Firedancer is arguably one of the most performant pieces of open source software ever created,” said Helius Labs CEO Mert on X.

Validators are crucial for proposing and verifying new blocks on the blockchain. Until now, Solana has only one validator client, unlike Ethereum, which boasts several, making it more resilient to bugs and attacks. Firedancer has been in the works since August 2022.

Solana enthusiasts are particularly excited about Firedancer because the network becomes more decentralized with the addition of another client, while also enhancing its security. 

It is expected that Firedancer will make Solana capable of processing 1 million transactions per second (TPS), orders of magnitude higher than the current real TPS of approximately 3,000. Ethereum’s max daily TPS is 22, while Ethereum layer 2 Base’s max daily TPS is 42, according to L2Beat.

“This might be the last large scale systems project that humans built all on their own,” said Solana co-founder of Anatoly Yakovenko on X.

What’s Next for Firedancer?

Despite this achievement, a Firedancer engineer noted that while the client built an additional three blocks, it encountered synchronization issues with the rest of the network and had to temporarily shut down. These issues are expected to be resolved in future updates.

Solana’s Yakovenko told The Defiant in May that there is a 50% chance that Firedancer will be live on mainnet before the Solana Breakpoint conference in September. Earlier this week, Jump Crypto announced it is offering up to $1 million in rewards to developers who find vulnerabilities in Firedancer.