Jump's Kevin Bowers is running development of Firedancer.
The upgrade from Jump Crypto could drastically boost transaction throughput, helping Solana support legacy financial markets.
Solana is ratcheting up testing of Firedancer, the highly anticipated software upgrade that promises to vastly increase the blockchain’s processing speed.
By the end of this week, Solana’s core developers want a “super majority” of processing power on the chain’s low-stakes test network to run through Frankendancer, an early version of Firedancer, according to messages in Solana’s technical Discord server.
The call-to-action to Solana’s validators — those who run computers that power the network — marks Firedancer’s biggest test yet. The upgrade has been in the works since 2022, when the chain frequently faltered, and is seen as a boost to Solana’s stability and speed.
Firedancer’s proponents believe the software – developed by the crypto arm of trading giant Jump – will give Solana an unbeatable edge in crypto’s race to woo global financial markets onto blockchains. They point to its theoretical speed: one million transactions per second, orders of magnitude faster than any blockchain-based system today.
Firedancer itself doesn’t yet have a launch date. For now, Jump Crypto has only launched Frankendancer, which is a hybrid combining elements from Firedancer and Solana’s predominant client architecture. Only a small subset of validators had adopted Frankendancer before this week; many told CoinDesk they found it buggy and prone to crashes.
