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Firedancer has quietly delegated stake to 32 Solana validators to kick off its new delegation program, in keeping with the shopper’s web site.
Delegation, or staking a few of a corporation’s crypto with plenty of validators primarily based on some standards, has been utilized by the Solana Basis to assist smaller validators get began on the community. Firedancer could also be hoping the delegation program may also help persuade validators to start out working its Frankendancer shopper, which at present accounts for simply 8% of all staked SOL. That proportion is up from 5-6% round a month in the past.
Firedancer is a from-scratch rewrite of Solana’s software program being created by Chicago-based buying and selling agency Leap. Firedancer could be Solana’s first true different shopper from the unique constructed by Solana Labs, which is now generally known as Agave. With two shoppers, Solana could be protected against having a single level of failure on the shopper aspect — which might trigger issues like community downtime.
A restricted model of the shopper, referred to as Frankendancer as a result of it mixed chunks of the Agave shopper with Leap-written code like Frankenstein’s monster, went dwell in late 2024. Full Firedancer is dwell in non-voting mode. The individuals in Firedancer’s delegation program are working Frankendancer.
Onchain knowledge reveals an account labeled as having been funded by Leap Crypto delegated roughly 20,000 SOL to the accepted validators. One validator, Watchtower, obtained over 1.2 million SOL. In a Discord message, Solana Basis validator relations lead Tim Garcia stated a person named italo, who’s related to Watchtower, is working the delegation program for Firedancer.
The Firedancer delegation individuals I spoke to had usually optimistic issues to say in regards to the shopper.
H2O Nodes famous that Frankendancer is extra secure now than the unique Solana shopper was when it began working a validator in 2022. Ian Unsworth from Kairos Analysis stated the agency’s validator has been packing extra compute models into blocks since switching to Frankendancer, which interprets to incrementally greater rewards in comparison with the community common. RockawayX founder and CEO Viktor Fischer agreed — estimating that Frankendancer provides 10-15% greater efficiency when measured by common compute models.
