Firedancer Efforts Bring Solana a Step Closer to Leap in Processing Power, Says Jump Trading’s Science Chief

Avoiding computer science “magical thinking” is the key to unlocking  capacity already available in the current Solana ecosystem, Kevin Bowers told the network’s Breakpoint conference in Singapore.

SINGAPORE – Kevin Bowers, the chief science officer at Jump Trading Group, took to the stage at the Solana Breakpoint conference on Friday, describing the latest breakthroughs in the multi-year effort to implement Firedancer, a new Solana client aimed at substantially improving Solana’s transaction processing capabilities. 

As part of his account of the past two years of work, Bowers gave conference attendees an update on the current status of Firedancer, which was initially announced at Breakpoint 2022, and the first Firedancer validator, nicknamed Frankendancer, which was announced at Breakpoint last year.

Frankendancer is live on mainnet, while Firedancer is active on testnet, a milestone for both Jump and the Solana ecosystem. 

Bowers said Jump had been working with the Solana Foundation and software firm Anza to slowly roll out Frankendancer and Firedancer to early adopters over the past few months as a means of minimizing risk. 

Read More: Solana’s Firedancer Client Builds First Block on Testnet

“We’ve come a long way,” he said. “We needed to overcome the pervasive computer science decision paralysis and improve the whole [Solana] ecosystem to realize the potential of modern computing technology.” 

During the past two years, Bowers said those involved in Firedancer and Frankendancer had open-sourced a tech stack for high-performance distributed applications, created custom hardware for future improvements, implemented tools for operator efficiency, and written documentation and testing hardness for upcoming community development. 

“By avoiding computer science ‘magical thinking’ and designing for real-world systems, we found orders of magnitude more capacity available in today’s ecosystem and demonstrated how to optimize for another order of magnitude,” Bowers said. 

“We now believe Frankendancer was more than a stepping stone to Firedancer [because] it is a useful, modular, high-performance platform for validator development.” 

What does this all mean from a technical perspective? According to Bowers, the answer is multifaceted:

• “We can use high-performance networking to receive raw transaction requests at the limits of the physical network,” he said. 
• “We can use wide parallelism to get massive signature verification capacity and high-performance computing to minimize how many cores are required for that capacity.”
• “We can use high-performance computing again to schedule verified transactions for executions as concurrent as possible to buy throughput.” 
• “We can use wide parallelism and high-performance computing for a balanced transaction execution capacity with minimal cores.”
• “We can use high-performance networking to distribute blocks at the limits of the physical network,” he added. 

When Firedancer reaches Solana mainnet, those in the ecosystem expect the network to become more decentralized, more secure, and faster. 

“We have shown that by streamlining data flow and optimizing everything along the path, a validator can hit its ecosystem’s physical limits,” Bowers said. “The widely available community hardware can have over a one-million-transactions-per-second capacity.” 

Bowers’ updates on Frankendancer and Firedancer come as SOL, the native token of the Solana blockchain that’s used to pay for gas transactions, had risen almost 9% in the previous 24 hours and roughly 657%, or more than sixfold, during the past year to trade above $150.

Solana’s market cap currently stands at $70.7 billion, making it the fifth-largest cryptocurrency, data from CoinGecko show.