Interpreting Firedancer: Ambitious technological feat or industry misunderstanding?

Author: Jarry Xiao Source: X, @jarxiao Translation: Shan Ouba

Firedancer is an extremely ambitious project and an impressive technical achievement. However, it also reflects the problem that the blockchain industry often prioritizes narratives over actual needs. The goal of building infrastructure should be to serve users, and the criterion for measuring its impact should be whether the goal is met.

The needs of different roles: validators, developers and users

Needs of validators
In a blockchain network, the core motivation of validators is to obtain more block rewards. To achieve this, they would like to see:

• More block rewards;

• Chain stability to ensure long-term rewards;

• Increase in block resource limits, which directly depends on client efficiency.

Developer needs
Developer needs focus more on the practicality of tools and the stability of the development environment:

• A highly functional tool chain to facilitate program development;

• A stable deployment environment to ensure that program execution properties do not change arbitrarily;

• A simple development experience to support the development of client applications and new features, such as larger transactions;

• A feasible path to acquire users and funds.

Users’ needs
Users are more concerned about the experience itself and the reliability of transactions:

• Well-designed, smooth, interesting, and even practical new products;

• Reliably completed transactions to avoid funds being stuck in the middle.

The short-term impact of Firedancer

Firedancer will bring a series of changes in the short term, but not all of them are positive. Here are its potential short-term impacts:

• Temporary stagnation of protocol development: Active protocol development may be paused as new clients are still under development;

• Network growing pains: Due to slight differences in the runtime of Firedancer and Agave clients, the network may experience instability;

• Limited speed improvements: Network speed will not increase significantly until the stake of Firedancer exceeds that of Agave.

Potentially Misleading: TPS and Client Diversity

Understanding of some key issues may mislead laymen, especially in the discussion about Firedancer:

• 1M TPS indicator is meaningless: 1 million transactions per second is just a theoretical value in a simulation environment and cannot reflect the transaction load in the real world;

• The problem of client diversity: Although diverse clients seem to help the network decentralization, running two clients at the same time actually goes against this original intention.
  In addition, larger blocks do not necessarily mean more block rewards. If the Firedancer client cannot support certain key functions, such as not supporting Jito auctions on the first day, it may lead to difficulties in staking conversion.

Pragmatic thinking: Are interests aligned?

The pragmatic question is whether the incentives of all stakeholders are aligned. This is key to judging whether the project currently being built is the "right" direction. Differences in needs between different groups may affect the effectiveness of Firedancer.

Is Firedancer what Solana needs most?

While Firedancer is a high-investment, high-impact project, it may not be the most urgent project for Solana at this time from a cost-effectiveness perspective. Here are some alternative projects that could have a greater impact on Solana at a lower cost:

• Increase the computational efficiency of the token program by 100x

• Increase the maximum transaction size, and charge an additional fee if it exceeds 1232 bytes

• Increase the depth of the CPI stack

• Continue to improve the network layer and scheduler

• Improve the fee model and increase the guarantees of transaction inclusion to give users more confidence.

Summary

The achievements of the Firedancer team are undoubtedly admirable. Their team is composed of more talented low-level engineers and has built a very outstanding system. However, we need to factor the scale and cost of the project into our prioritization when weighing Firedancer’s actual impact on Solana.