PANews reported on January 9 that, according to CoinDesk, Solana is accelerating the testing of Firedancer, a software upgrade that is expected to significantly increase the blockchain's processing speed. According to messages on the Solana Technical Discord server, the Solana core development team hopes that by the end of this weekend, the "vast majority" of the processing capacity on the low-risk test network will be able to run Frankendancer (an early version of Firedancer). The call to action for Solana validators marks the biggest challenge Firedancer has faced so far. This upgrade has been ongoing since the chain experienced frequent failures in 2022 and is seen as a way to enhance Solana's stability and speed.
Supporters of Firedancer believe that this software, developed by the crypto division of trading giant Jump, will give Solana an unparalleled advantage in the competition to attract global financial markets to the blockchain. They point to its theoretical speed: one million transactions per second, several orders of magnitude faster than any current blockchain-based system. The release date for Firedancer itself has not yet been determined. For now, Jump Crypto has only released Frankendancer, which is a combination of Firedancer and the Solana mainstream client architecture. Before this week, only a small number of validators had adopted Frankendancer, and many reported finding it buggy and prone to crashes.
On Tuesday, the Solana Foundation used this subsidy and penalty mechanism for the first time to directly promote the adoption of Frankendancer. Validators have only a few days to switch their test network systems to the new client, or else they will lose their delegated stake.
