Firedancer

Firedancer is a validator client for Solana: the software a validator runs to check transactions, vote and produce blocks. It is built by Jump Crypto, written from scratch in C, and shares no code with Agave, the Rust client that most of the network runs. This page is about that software, not the Twitch streamer or the Dave Matthews Band logo of the same name.

Firedancer has been live on Solana mainnet since 12 December 2025. Its purpose is twofold. A second, independent codebase means one bug is less likely to stop the whole network. And the design, borrowed from trading systems, aims to process far more transactions on the same hardware.

Is Firedancer live on Solana mainnet?

Yes. The full Firedancer client launched on Solana mainnet on 12 December 2025, after about 100 days of production testing, The Block reported. Work on the client started in 2022.

The rollout has been slow on purpose. "Firedancer is live and running in production," founding engineer Ritchie Patel told CoinDesk in May 2026, before adding: "We don't want everybody to run it yet." His reason was that half the network switching before the security audits were finished "would be a bit much".

Releases now arrive every week or two. The team tags each one on GitHub and marks it as testnet or mainnet ready. In August 2026 the tags moved from the v1.1 series to date-style numbers such as v26.08 and v26.09. Version v26.09.6, published on 6 October 2026, is a mainnet release that fixes stalls and behaviour on a degraded network.

How Firedancer works: tiles and kernel-bypass networking

Firedancer splits a validator into small programs called tiles. Each tile does one job, such as receiving transactions, checking signatures or packing a block. Each runs as its own Linux process, pinned to its own CPU core, and passes work to the next tile through shared memory.

Agave runs these jobs inside one large process. Splitting them up has two effects. Every core stays busy, so the machine does more work. And each tile can be locked down to the few system calls it needs, so a break-in to one tile does not hand over the whole validator. Helius's technical write-up covers the sandboxing in detail.

The networking is also custom. Firedancer reads packets straight from the network card instead of going through the Linux kernel, a technique called kernel bypass. The team wrote its own version of QUIC, the protocol Solana uses to receive transactions, and its own signature-checking code that uses AVX-512 instructions on modern CPUs to verify several signatures at once.

Firedancer vs Agave: what client diversity changes

Agave and Firedancer do the same job with different code. Agave is written in Rust and maintained by Anza. It descends from the original Solana Labs client. Firedancer is written in C by a separate team. That separation is the point.

Until Firedancer arrived, almost every validator ran Agave or Jito's fork of it. The Block put the two at more than 95% of validators. A serious bug in that shared code could stall every node at once, and Solana's past outages came from exactly that kind of fault. With two independent clients, a bug in one should leave the other running. Our piece on Solana's 30 months without a network-wide outage sets out the outage history.

The protection only works at scale. If a small share of stake runs Firedancer, an Agave bug can still halt the chain. And a second client adds a new risk: if the two disagree on the result of a transaction, the network can split. The two teams test against each other to prevent that, and Patel described the relationship as "more of a collaborative setting than a competition".

Frankendancer vs Firedancer, and why the hybrid is ending

Frankendancer is a hybrid. It uses Jump's code to receive transactions and build blocks, and leaves the rest to Agave: running transactions and voting. Firedancer is the full client, with no Agave code at all. Both come from the same code base.

The hybrid came first because a full rewrite takes years. It let operators test Jump's network code on the live chain while the rest was being written. When the full client launched in December 2025, Frankendancer ran on more than 26% of validators, according to Blockworks figures cited by The Block.

That bridge is now closing. Crypto Briefing reported on 11 September 2026 that Jump will end support for the hybrid when the Alpenglow upgrade goes live on mainnet. Operators would then move to the full client or back to Agave. A new Frankendancer release still shipped on 21 September 2026, built on Agave v4.3.0. We covered the change in our report on Alpenglow's testnet rollout.

Does Firedancer support Alpenglow?

Not yet, going by the testnet rollout in late September 2026. Alpenglow is the new way Solana nodes will vote on blocks. It aims to make a transaction final in a fraction of a second. On 22 September 2026, Anza told testnet operators that "Firedancer and Frankendancer do not support the Alpenglow migration". Nodes on either had to switch to Agave before the change went live.

Alpenglow is now live on devnet too. Anza has not set a mainnet date. Firedancer's release notes up to early October 2026 add other new Solana features, but they do not mention Alpenglow. If you run Firedancer, read each release note and Anza's notices to operators before the mainnet switch.

How fast is Firedancer? The 1 million TPS claim

The headline figure is 1 million transactions per second. Jump's chief scientist Kevin Bowers demonstrated more than that on commodity hardware at Breakpoint 2024, as The Block noted in its launch coverage. It is a demonstration figure, not what Solana mainnet processes.

On mainnet, the network's rules set the limit, and every client must obey them. Each block has a cap on how much work it can hold. In September 2025 Firedancer developers proposed SIMD-0370, which would remove that cap and let faster validators pack bigger blocks. Until changes like that pass, a Firedancer node shows its speed in smaller ways, such as quicker loading and lower memory use.

The memory gain is easy to see. The mainnet release of 22 September 2026 cut the client's memory use from about 307 GB to about 182 GB, per its release notes. Our summary of the "Wen Firedancer" talk at Breakpoint 2025 has the team's own account of how it runs on mainnet.

Who should run Firedancer, and what hardware it needs

Firedancer is for people who run Solana validators, and for now the skilled ones. It suits a team that can build the code itself, keep up with a new release every week or two, and hold an Agave node ready as a backup. Jump does not ship ready-made builds.

The getting-started guide lists these requirements:

The public docs lag the code. In October 2026 the guide still described the Frankendancer hybrid, so check the release notes for anything specific to the full client.

If you stake SOL and do not run a validator, you never touch Firedancer yourself. It reaches you through the client your validator picks. Staking with a well-run validator on a less common client helps spread the network's risk. You can compare validators by commission and uptime on our validator pages. Solana Compass runs its own validator, so weigh our view with that in mind.

Firedancer security audits, bug bounty and risks

Firedancer is young code doing a critical job, and the team says so. Its security rests on three things: the sandboxed tile design, outside audits and a paid bug bounty.

The audits have a clear scope. Neodyme audited Firedancer v0.1, the Frankendancer hybrid, and reported in mid-2024 no critical issues and two high-severity ones, one of which could crash a node remotely. The full client was then put through a public audit competition on Immunefi from 9 April to 9 May 2026. It covered about 636,000 lines of C and C++, carried reward pools totalling $1 million, and drew 537 valid submissions. Jump links its standing bug bounty from its Firedancer page.

The risks to weigh:

• Maturity. The client reached mainnet in December 2025 and still ships fixes for stalls and rare snapshot bugs, as the September 2026 release notes show.
• Consensus mismatch. Two clients must agree on every result. A difference between Firedancer and Agave could fork the network or get Firedancer validators' votes rejected.
• Upgrade lag. The Alpenglow testnet migration ran on Agave only. A client that trails a consensus upgrade forces its operators to switch software at short notice.
• One sponsor. Firedancer is open source under the Apache 2.0 licence, but one firm, Jump, employs the team that writes it.

Firedancer is software, not a protocol. It has no token and holds no user funds. A validator's stake is exposed to the client only through missed votes and missed blocks.

Wiredancer and Falcon: Jump's hardware and post-quantum research

Two research lines sit beside the main client. Wiredancer, announced on 6 August 2025, puts two FPGA cards in front of a validator. FPGAs are chips that can be wired for one task. The first card drops duplicate transactions and the second checks signatures in hardware. In Jump's test, a flood of badly signed transactions cut an unprotected mini-network's throughput by more than half and barely registered with Wiredancer in place.

The second line is post-quantum signatures, which are designed to resist future quantum computers. In a paper dated 30 July 2026, Jump Crypto's David Rubin and Emanuele Cesena verified a Falcon-512 signature in 3.6 microseconds on an AMD Zen 5 chip, about 2.6 times faster than the reference code. The code is public. Neither project is part of the mainnet client.

Who builds Firedancer: team and history

Firedancer is built by a team inside Jump Crypto, the crypto arm of trading firm Jump Trading Group. Kevin Bowers, Jump's chief scientist, leads the design. The project began in 2022, after a run of Solana outages, with the aim of giving the network a second client built like a trading engine.

The main milestones:

• 2022: development starts.
• September 2024: Frankendancer, the hybrid, goes live on mainnet.
• 12 December 2025: the full Firedancer client launches on mainnet.
• April to May 2026: the $1 million Immunefi audit competition on the full client.
• September 2026: Alpenglow reaches testnet and devnet on Agave, and the Frankendancer hybrid nears retirement.

For the engineering story in the team's words, see our summary of Kevin Bowers' Breakpoint 2024 keynote.