Firedancer begins delegating stake to Solana validators
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Firedancer has quietly delegated stake to 32 Solana validators to kick off its new delegation program, in response to the consumer’s web site.
Delegation, or staking a few of a company’s crypto with quite a few 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 might help persuade validators to begin working its Frankendancer consumer, 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 Soar. Firedancer can be Solana’s first true different consumer from the unique constructed by Solana Labs, which is now often called Agave. With two shoppers, Solana can be shielded from having a single level of failure on the consumer facet — which may trigger issues like community downtime.
A restricted model of the consumer, known as Frankendancer as a result of it mixed chunks of the Agave consumer with Soar-written code like Frankenstein’s monster, went stay in late 2024. Full Firedancer is stay in non-voting mode. The contributors in Firedancer’s delegation program are working Frankendancer.
Onchain information reveals an account labeled as having been funded by Soar Crypto delegated roughly 20,000 SOL to the authorized 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 contributors I spoke to had typically optimistic issues to say concerning the consumer.
H2O Nodes famous that Frankendancer is extra steady now than the unique Solana consumer 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 increased rewards in comparison with the community common. RockawayX founder and CEO Viktor Fischer agreed — estimating that Frankendancer provides 10-15% increased efficiency when measured by common compute models.
