Written by: Wu Tianyi, DeThings
On January 8, CoinDesk reported that Solana is stepping up testing of Firedancer, a highly anticipated software upgrade that is expected to significantly increase the blockchain’s processing speed.
By the end of this week, Solana’s core developers expect “the vast majority” of processing power on the chain’s low-stakes test network to be running through an early version of Firedancer, Frankendancer, according to messages in the Solana technical Discord server. And called on Solana validators (the people who run the computers that power the network) to take action. The upgrade has been in the works since 2022, when the chain was plagued by frequent failures, and is seen as a boost to Solana’s stability and speed.
The fastest blockchain in history is about to be born?
Firedancer’s backers argue that the software, developed by the cryptocurrency arm of trading giant Jump, will give Solana an unrivaled advantage in the race for cryptocurrencies to lure global financial markets to blockchains. They point to its theoretical speed of 1 million transactions per second, orders of magnitude faster than any blockchain-based system today.
As a new Solana validator client led by the Jump Crypto team, it is fundamentally committed to improving the throughput and security of the Solana network. As early as 2022, Firedancer began its development plan, which is in sharp contrast to Solana's existing Rust language client (Agave). Firedancer was redesigned in C and C++, a decision that greatly reduced the probability of system crashes due to problems such as memory leaks, making it more stable than existing clients.
In the early stages, the development of Firedancer faced many challenges. For example, due to the complexity of the new software, many defects were found during the testing process, which made many verifiers cautious about it.
Firedancer itself does not yet have a release date. For now, Jump Crypto has only launched Frankendancer, a hybrid that combines elements of Firedancer and Solana’s main client architecture. Before this week, only a small number of validators had adopted Frankendancer; many told CoinDesk they found it buggy and prone to crashing.
“It was very difficult to keep this project going, but we did it,” said Kollen House, a longtime member of the Solana validator community. He believes the new push for wider adoption of Frankendancer is a sign of the software’s “maturity.”
Firedancer Technology Innovation
Compared with the existing Solana client, Firedancer brings several important technical innovations, especially in high-performance computing and parallel processing. The architecture of Firedancer consists of three core components: high-performance computing stack, network stack, runtime, and consensus mechanism. These innovations have greatly improved the throughput of the Solana network, theoretically reaching more than 1 million transactions per second, far exceeding the throughput limit of existing systems.
Parallelism and efficient computing
Firedancer's design relies on a highly concurrent computing model, where each verification node performs different tasks, such as transaction verification, block packaging, and data processing, through multiple independent threads. This parallel processing enables the system to allocate computing resources more efficiently, maximize throughput, and increase processing speed. Each thread focuses on a task and has a dedicated CPU core, which avoids waste of resources.
Tiles Architecture
Firedancer introduces an innovative tile architecture (tiles), each tile corresponds to a specific task and is bound to a specific thread and CPU core. This flexible architecture enables different types of tasks to flexibly allocate resources according to actual needs. For example, the network stack (net) and QUIC protocol tiles are extremely fast and can handle more than 1 million transactions per second, while the transaction verification (verify) and bank operation (bank) tiles focus on the secure verification and execution of transactions. Although their throughput is lower, they can handle high-concurrency transaction requests.
Efficient consensus and network transmission mechanism
Firedancer's consensus mechanism reduces the latency of transaction verification and improves the responsiveness of the entire system by optimizing network data flow and distributed processing. This enables the Solana network to maintain its efficient operation during high concurrency and load surges, and avoid system crashes caused by single point failures.
Firedancer’s Impact on Solana
Breakthrough Throughput
One of the biggest highlights of Firedancer is its improved performance. According to the development team, Firedancer is able to process more than 1 million transactions per second, far exceeding Solana's current theoretical limit of 50,000 TPS. This performance has greatly improved the competitiveness of the Solana blockchain in the global financial market and provided a more powerful infrastructure for future DeFi and Web3 applications. For reference, traditional financial payment systems such as Visa usually have a transaction throughput of only tens of thousands per second. Firedancer's performance will undoubtedly make Solana stand out from these competitors and become the leader of future blockchain payments.
Enhance network stability and security
In addition to performance improvements, Firedancer also greatly enhances the security of the Solana network. By introducing a new client that is compatible with existing systems, Firedancer not only enhances the decentralization of the Solana network, but also further reduces the risk of network crashes due to single client failures. Unlike the original Rust client, Firedancer is written in C and C++, which can not only effectively avoid downtime caused by problems such as memory leaks, but also minimize the scope of impact when failures occur.
Reduce the complexity of network upgrades
The introduction of Firedancer also provides a new solution for upgrading the Solana network. In previous versions, Solana had to rely on fewer clients for network updates and maintenance, and this single-point dependency often led to technical difficulties during the upgrade process. With the addition of Firedancer, Solana now has more client options, making network upgrades more flexible and efficient. In addition, Firedancer is compatible with existing protocols, ensuring a smooth transition of the ecosystem without major adjustments for DApp developers and users.
