PANews reported on January 9 that according to CoinDesk, Solana is stepping up testing of Firedancer, a software upgrade that is expected to significantly increase the processing speed of the blockchain. According to the message in the Solana technology Discord server, the Solana core development team hopes that by the end of this week, the "vast majority" of processing power in the on-chain 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 test Firedancer has faced so far. The upgrade has been in progress since the chain frequently failed in 2022 and is seen as enhancing Solana's stability and speed.
Firedancer’s backers argue that the software, developed by the crypto arm of trading giant Jump, will give Solana an unparalleled advantage in the race to lure global financial markets to blockchain. They point to its theoretical speed: a million transactions per second, orders of magnitude faster than any blockchain-based system today. Firedancer itself has yet to set a release date. For now, Jump Crypto has only launched Frankendancer, a combination of Firedancer and Solana’s mainstream client architecture. Before this week, only a small number of validators had adopted Frankendancer, and many said they found it buggy and prone to crashing.
On Tuesday, the Solana Foundation used this subsidy reward and penalty mechanism for the first time to directly promote Frankendancer adoption. Validators only have a few days to switch their testnet systems to the new client, otherwise they will lose their delegated interests.
