Firedancer: A Key Step in Solana’s Evolution

Introduction and context about Solana

After a particularly challenging 2022 and a recovery that began in 2023, 2024 has been a year of confirmation for Solana. The SOL price has risen by more than 42%, bringing Solana's market capitalization to nearly 68 billion dollars. Many reasons can explain this increase, but one of them is likely the success of the memecoin season, with the emergence or surge of cryptocurrencies like BONK, POPCAT, and WIF, whose performance broke all records.

However, this success has not erased the main challenges Solana faces. Whether in terms of resilience or decentralization, the protocol still needs to evolve to meet the demands of enterprises and users. In this context, we decided to delve into the fundamentals of Firedancer, an initiative aimed at helping Solana overcome some of its limitations.

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Understanding Validators and Validator Clients on Solana

Before diving into the details of Firedancer, it is essential to recall some fundamental concepts about Solana, particularly: validators and validator clients.

What is a validator?

A validator is a key player in a blockchain (here, Solana), whose role is to participate in the network's operation by verifying and validating transactions before adding them to the blockchain. This role is crucial to ensure the network's security and integrity. In exchange for this work, the validator receives rewards but can also be penalized if acting maliciously.

Currently, Solana has 1,379 validators. In comparison, Ethereum has nearly 1,077,000 validators.

What is a validator client?

To interact with Solana or any other blockchain, it is necessary to run a client software, often called a node. A validator client is precisely this software used by individuals wishing to participate in the transaction validation process on a blockchain, especially on Proof of Stake (PoS) networks.

The validator client allows users to propose, verify, and approve blocks while communicating with the rest of the network. It plays several essential roles, such as managing staking and ensuring the validator's data security. As you can see, having multiple different validator clients strengthens the network’s resilience, as a failure in one client will not affect the entire network if other clients continue to operate.

Currently, Solana has 3 validator clients. In comparison, Ethereum has 5 validator clients for execution.

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Solana's Current Challenges

A blockchain inevitably faces the trilemma problem: it is impossible to offer a high level of scalability, security, and decentralization simultaneously. In this context, Solana has chosen to prioritize scalability and security at the expense of decentralization. This choice is, of course, one of the reasons for the network’s popularity, as transaction execution latency and fees are extremely low, but it also introduces issues that should not be overlooked.

One of Solana’s main issues is the centralization of its validator clients. The network mainly relies on three clients: Solana Labs' primary client (written in Rust), the Sig client (written in the Zig programming language), and the Jito-Solana client (a fork of Rust). This concentration around similar languages exposes the network to risks of failure or targeted attacks.

Indeed, in an effort to decentralize the network, a blockchain should encourage the community to build their own client software in different programming languages. This way, validator nodes would have several options at their disposal, which would limit the risks of having a single point of failure. This is notably the case on Ethereum, where there are 5 different clients for execution and 4 different clients for consensus.

This lack of client diversity makes Solana vulnerable to cascading failures in the event of a bug or flaw in one of the validation software. Furthermore, it does not encourage innovation; healthy competition between different independent clients would foster proposals of innovations that could significantly improve the network. Therefore, enhancing validator client diversity is crucial for improving the network's resilience and decentralization.

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Firedancer: A Key to Solana’s Decentralization

What is Firedancer?

Firedancer is a new independent validator client for the Solana blockchain, developed by Jump Crypto, a subsidiary of Jump Trading Group specializing in high-frequency trading and technology infrastructure. It is a complete rewrite of Solana's validator client, initially coded in Rust, now written in the C and C++ languages.

Firedancer’s ambition is to help Solana improve its capacity to process information and transactions. Although Solana is already a particularly fast blockchain, with a theoretical capacity of 50,000 transactions per second (TPS), these limits are never reached. The introduction of Firedancer could, according to developers, enable a target of more than one million TPS. Additionally, this new independent validator client could strengthen the network’s diversity, resilience, and thus security in the long term.

Technical Details of Firedancer

Firedancer is set to become Solana’s fastest validator client thanks to several key optimizations based on Jump’s expertise in high-frequency trading and high-performance computing. It’s worth noting that Firedancer’s development is a continuous process. This means that Jump is constantly improving the client by identifying and optimizing code sections that can still evolve, even after the initial launch.

Here are the main technical details used to enhance the speed, resilience, and efficiency of this client:

• Complete rewrite in the C language

  Firedancer is entirely rewritten in the C language, a highly performant and resource-efficient programming language. Unlike other more abstract languages like Rust (used by Solana Labs), C allows for more precise control over memory management and interactions with computing hardware.

• Modularity and minimalism

  Unlike Solana Labs' validation client, which operates as a single process, Firedancer is built on a modular architecture, meaning that each software component (network, execution engine, consensus, etc.) is designed independently of others, as multiple individual processes, called “tiles.”

This approach allows each module to be optimized separately without introducing complex dependencies or slowdowns between different system parts. If a tile fails or a major update needs to be deployed, the impact is limited to the affected process, maintaining the operation of other validator parts without requiring a complete restart.

• Transaction Processing Optimization One of the critical points for a blockchain’s performance is how data is transmitted and processed on the network. Firedancer optimizes data management to minimize latency. Jump’s expertise in managing ultra-fast networks for financial transactions has proven useful for these various optimizations.

To delve into the details, Firedancer addresses the issue of processing transactions pending validation on the Solana network, which led to major outages in 2021. The validator client adopts a protocol called QUIC, designed to control inbound flows and improve traffic management and communications to avoid DDoS attacks or congestion-related issues. It’s worth noting that Firedancer developed its own version of QUIC in C, eliminating certain issues related to its implementation on a blockchain network like Solana.

Moreover, Firedancer uses a custom network architecture based on the Receive-Side Scaling (RSS) system, a hardware network feature that distributes traffic across multiple CPU cores, thus improving parallelism on Solana.

• Network Optimization and Latency Reduction Firedancer is designed to handle a very high number of transactions per second (TPS). This improvement is achieved through optimized management of inbound transaction flows (enabled notably by the QUIC protocol) and better utilization of hardware resources.

Indeed, one of the major challenges to a blockchain’s speed is physical latency, i.e., the limitations due to the speed at which data can move through a network or computer. Kevin Bowers, Chief Scientist at Jump, explained that even the speed of light can sometimes become a limiting factor in systems designed to be ultra-fast.

Thus, Firedancer introduces a new parallelism mechanism in optimizing signature verification calculations (ED25519, for reference), based on the principle that: “It is much easier to do independent things in parallel than to do one thing at a time, even with custom hardware.”

To circumvent technical limitations further, Firedancer optimizes not only the software but also the way data is transmitted and processed at the hardware level. They use “lock-free” algorithms, allowing processors to handle data without waiting for responses from other processors.

Finally, Firedancer chose to use FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) hardware to handle these specific optimization tasks. FPGAs combine low power consumption and low latency, outperforming traditional CPUs and GPUs for these types of intensive calculations (for reference, an FPGA consumes about 50 W compared to 300 W for a GPU and can handle up to 8 million signatures per second, far surpassing the performance of CPUs and GPUs).

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Where Does Firedancer Stand and What’s Next?

Firedancer has made several significant strides in its development and continues to progress toward a full deployment on the Solana mainnet. One of the most notable advances is the launch of Frankendancer, a preliminary version, on the Solana mainnet. This news was announced by Kevin Bowers, Chief Scientist at Jump Crypto, at the Solana Breakpoint conference in Singapore at the end of September 2024.

Frankendancer is a hybrid model that combines elements of the Firedancer client, coded in C, with certain existing functionalities of Solana Labs’ client (called Agave) coded in Rust. This approach allows the Jump Crypto team to gradually introduce new Firedancer features while ensuring compatibility with the rest of Solana’s ecosystem. Currently, Frankendancer supports all the network functionalities of a Solana validator.

Frankendancer operates in parallel with the Agave client. In other words, when launching a Frankendancer validator, the Agave client also starts simultaneously, ensuring continuity of operations while testing the new Firedancer client components. While waiting for the full launch of Firedancer, planned for late 2024, Frankendancer will continue to operate in this manner.

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Conclusion: Firedancer, a Game-Changer for Solana?

By introducing Firedancer, Jump Crypto allows Solana to diversify its validator client base, making the network more resistant to targeted attacks and bugs. If one client experiences a failure, other clients, using a different code language, can keep the network operational. This diversity also reduces the risk of DDoS attacks, a common threat for blockchains centralized around a limited number of clients.

The technical innovations proposed by Firedancer limit the risk of a bug affecting one client from paralyzing the entire network and preventing it from functioning correctly. We can obviously recall the various outages that have occurred on the network, where the Solana blockchain was completely halted. Thus, Solana not only becomes more resilient but also more secure and decentralized.

As mentioned in this analysis, Firedancer not only improves resilience but also represents a major lever for Solana’s scalability. With optimized code, strategic hardware choices, and more efficient management of inbound transaction flows, Firedancer will enable handling a larger volume of transactions with faster validation times. Moreover, future support for sharding, introduced by Firedancer and not yet supported by the Solana blockchain, will further increase the network's capacity to handle a growing transaction load.

These improvements will allow Solana to remain competitive in the increasingly competitive blockchain market, as shown in our latest report on Layer 1 activities, while offering a smoother experience for its users.