Solana’s next-generation validator client, Firedancer, may not reach full speed on the network it was built for as technical limits push developers to test it elsewhere.
One of those developers is Douglas Colkitt, a former high-frequency trader who’s testing a hybrid validator setup called Frankendancer on Fogo, a Solana-compatible chain built to remove the constraints that currently prevent Firedancer from reaching its full potential on Solana.
Colkitt, a founding contributor at Fogo, said the new blockchain isn’t trying to replace Solana but does discard some of Solana’s core assumptions, such as globally distributed validator sets, to showcase how far Firedancer can go when speed takes priority over decentralization.
The push to run Firedancer outside Solana highlights a deeper split in blockchain infrastructure: the tension between decentralization and speed. These two have long been trade-offs, but more builders are now choosing to prioritize speed.
Why Firedancer can’t go full speed on Solana yet
Jump Trading developed Firedancer, a high-performance validator client aimed at boosting Solana’s throughput and reducing latency. But according to Colkitt, Solana’s architecture includes technical constraints that limit how fast Firedancer can operate in practice.
“If you have two clients running on the same network, you can only go as fast as the slowest client because otherwise the network risks halting,” he told Cointelegraph.
“It’s like driving a Ferrari in city traffic — no matter how fast the car is, you’re limited by the speed of the other vehicles around you.”
Solana currently supports two main validator client implementations: Agave and Firedancer. Agave is running on about 90% of validators as of Friday. Meanwhile, Firedancer is still in a transitional phase as Frankendancer, a hybrid combining Agave and Firedancer. It accounts for about 10% of validators, up from 7% in April.
Frankendancer’s hybrid approach allows for a gradual adoption of Firedancer’s improvements without risking network stability.
Solana’s network relies on a globally distributed set of validators. This geographic decentralization strengthens security by preventing any single party or region from gaining excessive control. It also enhances censorship resistance and resilience against localized outages or attacks.
Related: Crypto needs minimum viable decentralization to guide performance-focused infrastructure
This also means that decentralization comes with performance trade-offs. Data and consensus messages must travel long distances, resulting in unavoidable network latency. Even with optimized software like Frankendancer and the fastest hardware, Solana’s block time remains around 400 milliseconds.
“Trading firms absolutely need something faster than 400 milliseconds. If you have events like a [Federal Reserve] announcement or nonfarm payrolls, you want to be closer to that data to trade off of it,” Colkitt said.
Solana is also working to reduce latency. On Thursday, the Solana Foundation unveiled a roadmap aiming to establish the “Internet Capital Market” by 2027, targeting millisecond-level control over transaction ordering in smart contracts.
Firedancer’s real-world test outside Solana
Colkitt traces his entry into crypto back to “DeFi Summer.” He was working on an automated market maker project on Ethereum and its emerging rollups.
“The Ethereum chains weren’t sufficient for what we wanted to do,” Colkitt said, explaining why he left the Ethereum ecosystem in search of alternatives better suited for high-frequency trading.
“We spent a lot more time playing politics — which L2 do we go to? How do we get L2 support? — that kind of distracted from building the core products.”
This fragmentation held back innovation compared to the simplicity and unified liquidity of early Ethereum, Colkitt said, which was more apparent in Solana.
However, Solana is still relatively young. It produced its first block in March 2020. Traditional financial institutions are slower in embracing newer blockchain platforms like Solana, Colkitt said, adding that banks still remain comfortable primarily within Ethereum-compatible ecosystems.
Related: LetsBonk overtakes Pump.fun: Are Solana memecoins back for good?
On the demand side, Colkitt pointed to projects like Hyperliquid, which push the limits of current blockchain infrastructure.
“Hyperliquid owns 90% plus of the market in decentralized perpetuals trading,” he noted. “But that kind of ultra-low latency, high-throughput trading experience just doesn’t reliably work on Solana today because of block times and network stability.”
Fogo, which…
cointelegraph.com