Solana Urges Validators to Test Early ‘Firedancer’ Upgrade

Solana is stepping up testing of Firedancer, a much-anticipated software upgrade that promises to drastically increase the blockchain’s processing speed. By the end of the week, Solana’s core developers hope to have the “vast majority” of processing power on the chain’s low-stakes test network running through an early version of Firedancer, called Frankendancer, according to information in the Solana technical Discord server. The call for Solana validators, the people who run the computers that power the network, marks the biggest test of Firedancer yet. The upgrade, which has been in the works since 2022, when the chain was plagued by frequent outages, is seen as a boost to Solana’s stability and speed.

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: 1 million transactions per second, orders of magnitude faster than any blockchain-based system today.

Firedancer itself has yet to set a release date. For now, Jump Crypto has launched only Frankendancer, a hybrid that combines elements of Firedancer and Solana’s main client architecture. Before this week, only a small group of validators had adopted Frankendancer; many told CoinDesk they found it buggy and prone to crashing.

“It’s notoriously hard to keep this thing alive and running, but we did it,” said Kollen House, a longtime member of the Solana validator community. He sees the new push for wider Frankendancer adoption as a sign of the software’s “maturity.”

“If you have the confidence to say, ‘Hey, we want 60% of the testnets to be running this client,’ then we’re almost there,” House said.

Crypto networks like Solana are powered by hundreds of individual validators. Each validator independently runs a computer with “client” software installed that connects them to the network. This decentralization helps the blockchain remain secure, but it can make upgrading the system harder to coordinate.

For years, the Solana Foundation, the nonprofit that manages the network, has partially addressed this coordination challenge with subsidies. Its “delegation program” helps smaller validators (those that don’t have as much SOL staked, and therefore earn less for their work validating the chain) stay profitable. It often coaxes validators to keep their software updated by threatening to revoke the delegated stake of those who don’t upgrade in time.

On Tuesday, the Solana Foundation used this subsidy carrot-and-stick policy for the first time to directly promote Frankendancer adoption. Validators have just a few days to switch their testnet systems to the new client or lose their delegated stake.

“At this point, they seem to be getting there,” said validator operator Jon, who said he has been running Frankendancer for several months. “Right now, about 30% of validators on the testnet are running Frankendancer, but they still think they haven’t reached a supermajority yet.”