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According to the client’s website, Firedancer has commissioned stakes to 32 Solana Validators to 32 Solana Validators and launched a new delegation program.
Staking part of an organization’s cryptography using a delegation, or many validators based on a number of criteria, is used by the Solana Foundation to help small validators get started on the network. Firedancer may hope that the delegation will help persuade the verifier to begin running the Frankendancer client, which currently accounts for 8% of all Sol. That percentage rose to 5-6% about a month ago.
Firedancer is a rewrite from Scratch of Solana’s software, created by Chicago-based trading company Jump. Firedancer was the first true alternative client of the original Solana, built by Solana Labs, and is now known as Agave. With two clients, Solana is protected from having a single point of failure on the client side. This can lead to network downtime and more.
A limited version of the client called Frankendancer was released in late 2024 because it combined chunks from Agave Client with jump-written code like Frankenstein’s Monster. Full Fire Dancers live in non-boat mode. Participants in the Firedancer Delegation Program run Frankendancer.
Onchain data shows accounts labeled as funded by Jump Crypto. One validator, Wash Tower, received over 1.2 million sols. Tim Garcia, lead of Solana Foundation Validator Relations, said Tim Garcia of Solana Foundation Balidator Relations, that a user named Italo, associated with the watchman, is running the Firedancer delegation program.
Participants of the Firedancer delegation I spoke to were generally positive about the client.
The H2O nodes noted that they are now more stable than the original Solana client, which Frankendancer began running the validator in 2022. Kaiross Research’s Ian Unsworth has packed more computational units into blocks since the company’s validator switched to Frank Dancer, translated into a gradually higher reward compared to the network’s average. Rockawayx founder and CEO Viktor Fischer agreed – Frankendancer estimated it delivers 10-15% performance when measured with the average calculation unit.
