Solana has experienced four block production halts in the past, each requiring manual intervention from hundreds of validators—raising concerns about the network's reliability.
In order to address these outages, the diversity of validator clients on Solana needs to be increased.
One significant advancement in this area is the Firedancer validator client, developed by Jump Crypto.
But what exactly is Firedancer, and why is it generating so much buzz?
Read on to find out.
Validator client diversity
Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchains such as Solana and Ethereum encourage external developers to create independent validator clients (i.e. software validators) used to confirm and process transactions on the network.
This approach provides several key benefits:
- Codebase diversity: Independent validator clients maintain their own distinct codebase, which decreases the risk of bugs or attacks affecting the entire network. If one validator client encounters a bug or is targeted in an attack, the others remain unaffected, preserving the integrity of the blockchain and protecting it from systemic failures.
- Transaction finality: **When multiple validator clients are in operation, the risk of a single validator client manipulating transactions or compromising transaction finality is minimized—improving security and making it harder for bad actors to exploit any potential vulnerabilities.
- Developer flexibility: Developers are free to build validator clients using their preferred programming languages, enabling them to optimize the software for specific use cases. This flexibility encourages innovation and the development of highly efficient and specialized validator clients, each contributing to the decentralization of the blockchain.
Essentially, a diverse ecosystem of validator clients helps ensure that Solana remains secure, resilient, and adaptable to future challenges.
Validator clients on Solana
Currently, Solana primarily relies on two active validator clients:
- Solana Labs: This is the original validator client developed by Solana Labs, written in the Rust programming language. It has been effective, but it was developed quickly in a startup environment, leaving room for optimization. The Solana Labs validator client has since been forked by Anza, which will continue its development as the "Agave" validator client. Agave is designed to work in conjunction with Firedancer (more on this later).
- Jito: The Jito validator client is a fork of the Solana Labs validator client and is mostly used by validators that specialize on all things Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). By optimizing for MEV, the Jito validator client helps reduce network spam and improves the overall efficiency of Solana.
While both of these validator clients have played a crucial role in Solana’s success, the community recognizes the importance of validator client diversity and is taking steps to improve it.
What’s next for Solana validators?
To address the need to diversify, several new validator clients are being developed, each offering unique features and improvements. Some of the most notable validator clients in the pipeline include:
- Sig: A Solana validator client written in the Zig programming language. It focuses on optimizing RPC processes to boost validator performance.
- Mithril: A full node client written in the Go programming language, designed for home verification—enabling users to confirm and process Solana transactions with minimal hardware resources.
- Tinydancer: An open-source light client, which aims to streamline operations and lower hardware requirements for validators.
While these developments are all exciting, Firedancer stands out as the most anticipated release.
Firedancer: A game-changer for Solana
Firedancer is a new, high-performance validator client written in the C++ programming language, developed by Jump Crypto.
The validator client is independently developed—sharing virtually no code with the original Solana Labs validator client. This means that bugs or issues in one validator client won’t affect the other, significantly reducing the chances of network-wide outages and improving Solana’s uptime and reliability.
In addition to bolstering network resilience, Firedancer aims to dramatically increase Solana’s transaction processing capabilities. Currently, Firedancer is live on Solana testnet, but its potential is already evident through its predeceesor: Frankendancer. Frankendancer is operational on Solana mainnet, and, remarkably, has recently demonstrated the ability to process an unprecedented one million transactions per second (TPS) using standard consumer-grade hardware—setting a new benchmark in the crypto ecosystem.
With innovations such as Firedancer, Agave, Sig, Mithril, and Tinydancer, Solana is positioning itself as a resilient, decentralized, and high-performance blockchain capable of handling the demands and use cases of a rapidly growing onchain ecosystem.
If you’re eager to explore Solana’s performance and reliability capabilities, here’s what you can do with Phantom today:
- Trading: Trade tokens from established projects such as Jito (JTO), Kamino (KMINO), and Jupiter (JUP), or dive into popular memecoins such as WIF, BONK, POPCAT, and FWOG.
- Bridging: Bridge tokens from Base, Ethereum, and Polygon to Solana to capitalize on yield farming with Kamino or explore perpetual futures trading on Drift.
- Prediction Markets: Participate in trading event outcomes on "BET," Drift’s Solana equivalent to Polymarket.
- Payments: Use SOL or stablecoins such as USDC to pay for goods and services at brick-and-mortar stores with Ripe.
Interested in getting started? Read on for all the details you need to dive into the Solana ecosystem.
Getting started on Solana with Phantom
Phantom offers browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome, Brave, and Edge, as well as apps for iOS and Android to get started on Solana.
- First, download Phantom. Then, create a new wallet.
Once you do that, you're ready to go.
To fund your Phantom wallet, make sure you read our Apple Pay and Google Pay guide.
How to bridge tokens to Solana with Phantom?
If you already have a Phantom wallet and would like to bridge funds to Solana, use our very own Crosschain Swapper. With our Crosschain Swapper, you can bridge tokens across Solana, Ethereum, Base, and Polygon right in your Phantom wallet.
Disclaimer: This guide is strictly for educational purposes only and doesn’t constitute financial or legal advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.
