Firedancer Begins Delegating Stake to Solana Validators

This is an excerpt from the Lightspeed Newsletter. To read the full version, please subscribe. According to the client’s website, Firedancer has quietly delegated stakes to 32 Solana validators to launch its new delegation program.

Delegation, or assigning a portion of an organization’s cryptocurrency to multiple validators based on certain criteria, has been used by the Solana Foundation to help smaller validators get started on the network. Firedancer likely hopes this delegation program will encourage validators to start running its Frankendancer client, which currently accounts for only 8% of all staked SOL. This is up from about 5-6% a month ago.

Firedancer is Solana software rewritten from scratch by Chicago-based trading firm Jump. Firedancer will become Solana’s first true alternative client, distinct from the original client built by Solana Labs (now known as Agave). With two clients, Solana will be protected from single points of client failure, which can lead to network outages and other issues.

A limited version of a client called Frankendancer went live at the end of 2024, as it combines parts of the Agave client with code written by Jump (like Frankenstein’s monster). The full Firedancer runs in non-voting mode. Participants in the Firedancer delegation program are running Frankendancer.

On-chain data shows that an account labeled as funded by Jump Crypto has delegated about 20,000 SOL to approved validators. One validator, Watchtower, received over 1.2 million SOL. Tim Garcia, Head of Validator Relations at the Solana Foundation, stated in a Discord message that the user italo, associated with Watchtower, is running the delegation program for Firedancer.

The Firedancer delegation participants I interviewed generally gave positive feedback about the client.

H2O Nodes noted that Frankendancer is now more stable than the original Solana client was when they started running validators in 2022. Ian Unsworth of Kairos Research said that since switching to Frankendancer, their validator has been able to pack more compute units into blocks, which translates to higher rewards compared to the network average. Viktor Fischer, founder and CEO of RockawayX, agreed, estimating that Frankendancer delivers 10-15% higher performance in average compute units.

Unsworth said that Frankendancer has yet to face a true stress test, but added that the upcoming pump.fun token is reportedly expected to stimulate network activity and push Frankendancer to its limits.

Firedancer stated that it plans to delegate 2 million SOL to about 100 validators in the first phase of its delegation program. It also noted that each iteration of the program will run for about three months.

Notably, Firedancer’s initial standard of 20,000 SOL per validator is less generous than the Solana Foundation’s delegation program. The Solana Foundation has staked 35 million SOL across 569 validators, averaging about 60,000 SOL per validator.

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