The next-generation validator client Firedancer for Solana may not be able to reach full speed on the network it is built for, as technical limitations force developers to test it elsewhere.
One of the developers is Douglas Colkitt, a former high-frequency trader, who is testing a hybrid validator setup called Frankendancer on Fogo. Fogo is a Solana-compatible chain designed to eliminate the current limitations that hinder Firedancer from realizing its full potential on Solana.
Colkitt, one of the founding contributors of Fogo, stated that the new blockchain is not intended to replace Solana but rather discards some of Solana's core assumptions, such as a globally distributed validator set, to demonstrate how far Firedancer can go when speed is prioritized over decentralization.
The push to run Firedancer outside of Solana highlights a deeper divide in blockchain infrastructure: the tension between decentralization and speed. Both have long been trade-offs, but an increasing number of builders are choosing to prioritize speed.
Jump Trading developed Firedancer, a high-performance validator client designed to increase Solana's throughput and reduce latency. However, according to Colkitt, Solana's architecture contains technical limitations that restrict the actual speed at which Firedancer can operate.
“If you run two clients on the same network, you can only run at the speed of the slowest client, or else there’s a risk of network stalls,” he said in an interview with Cointelegraph.
Solana currently supports two main validator client implementations: Agave and Firedancer. As of Friday (July 25), Agave is running on about 90% of validators. Meanwhile, Firedancer is still in a transitional phase, operating as a hybrid of Agave and Firedancer called Frankendancer. It accounts for about 10% of validators, up from 7% in April.
The hybrid approach of Frankendancer allows for a gradual adoption of Firedancer's improvements without jeopardizing network stability.
Solana's network relies on a globally distributed validator set. This geographical decentralization enhances security by preventing any single party or region from gaining excessive control. It also enhances resistance to censorship and resilience against local disruptions or attacks.
This also means that decentralization comes with performance trade-offs. Data and consensus messages must be transmitted over long distances, leading to inevitable network latency. Even with optimized software like Frankendancer and the fastest hardware, Solana's block time remains around 400 milliseconds.
“Trading firms absolutely need speeds faster than 400 milliseconds. If you have events like Federal Reserve announcements or non-farm payroll data, you want to be closer to that data to trade,” Colkitt said.
Solana is also working to reduce latency. On Thursday (July 24), the Solana Foundation announced a roadmap aimed at establishing an "internet capital market" by 2027, with the goal of achieving millisecond-level transaction ordering control in smart contracts.
Colkitt traces his entry into the crypto space back to the "DeFi summer." At that time, he was working on an automated market-making project on Ethereum and its emerging rollups.
“The Ethereum chain wasn’t sufficient to support what we wanted to do,” Colkitt explained why he left the Ethereum ecosystem in search of alternatives better suited for high-frequency trading.
“We spent more time politically—where should we go for L2? How do we get L2 support?—which somewhat distracted us from building the core product.”
Colkitt said this fragmentation hindered innovation, which is more pronounced in Solana compared to the simplicity and unified liquidity of early Ethereum. However, Solana is still relatively young. It generated its first block in March 2020. Traditional financial institutions have been slow to adopt new blockchain platforms like Solana. Colkitt added that banks still feel comfortable primarily in Ethereum-compatible ecosystems.
In terms of demand, Colkitt pointed to projects like Hyperliquid that push the limits of current blockchain infrastructure.
“Hyperliquid has over 90% market share in decentralized perpetual trading markets, but this ultra-low latency, high-throughput trading experience cannot reliably run on today’s Solana due to block time and network stability,” he noted.
Fogo launched its testnet on Tuesday (July 22), using Solana-based technology to compete with chains like Hyperliquid. It is built on the Solana virtual machine and is compatible with projects currently running on Solana.
Fogo is currently running on Frankendancer and plans to fully transition to Firedancer when ready, unlocking the full potential of the validator client. When asked about the timeline, Colkitt gave a “very rough guess” of the end of this year. Fogo plans to launch its mainnet in September.
Next-generation low-latency networks like Fogo and Hyperliquid are pushing boundaries to meet the speed demands of modern trading. Projects like MegaETH also promise near-instant transactions, targeting emerging areas that require real-time execution, such as decentralized physical infrastructure networks.
What these chains have in common is a willingness to make trade-offs, reducing decentralization for scalability. Fogo intentionally reduces the geographical distribution of validators to gain this speed advantage.
“What we’re doing at Fogo is launching validator nodes in a few key global locations—Tokyo, London, and New York—to reduce latency between them,” he said.
This trade-off lays the groundwork for an important experiment. The true potential of Firedancer may never be fully realized on Solana itself, a network constrained by its global validator set and commitment to decentralization.
Instead, the testing platform for what ultra-fast high-performance blockchain infrastructure can truly achieve comes at the cost of decentralization. However, Solana is not standing still. Its recently announced 2027 roadmap aims to bring blockchain closer to traditional financial standards.
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