Firedancer 🔥💃
Firedancer is a new validator client for Solana, designed to push the limits of performance while enhancing the security and resilience of the network.Built for Performance and Resilience
The Firedancer project brings decades of experience from high-frequency trading to blockchain infrastructure. By leveraging expertise in building low-latency, high-throughput systems, Firedancer aims to significantly improve the power, reliability, and security of the Solana ecosystem.Fast
Designed from the ground up to be fast. The concurrency model draws from experience in the low latency trading space, and the code contains many novel high-performance reimplementations of core Solana primitives.
Secure
The architecture of the validator allows it to run with a highly restrictive sandbox and almost no system calls. The security model is inspired by methods used in the browser world.
Independent
Firedancer is written from scratch in C. This brings client diversity to the Solana network and helps it stay resilient to supply chain attacks in build tooling or dependencies.
Two Validators, One Codebase
The Firedancer project produces two validators from the same codebase:Frankendancer
A hybrid validator using parts of Firedancer and parts of Agave. Currently available on both Solana testnet and mainnet-beta.
Firedancer
A full from-scratch validator with no Agave code. Under active development for future release.
Frankendancer uses the Firedancer networking stack and block production components to perform better while leader. Other functionality including execution and consensus uses the Agave validator code.
Why Firedancer Matters
As a second validator codebase, Firedancer removes the risk of a single point of failure. As nodes are distributed more evenly among several independent codebases, the overall network becomes more robust against any one bug. Client Diversity Benefits:- Eliminates single points of failure in the network
- Reduces the likelihood of network-wide vulnerabilities
- Provides diversification of security approaches
- Enables lower cost hardware requirements, encouraging more validator operators to join
Get Started
Ready to run Firedancer? Check out the Getting Started guide to learn how to set up and operate a Firedancer validator node.Getting Started
Learn how to install, configure, and run a Firedancer validator