Announcing Firedancer Support: The Future of High-Performance Solana Staking

Key Takeaways

• What’s new: Figment clients can now delegate to or run Firedancer-powered validators
• Why it matters: Combines Firedancer’s performance gains with Figment’s institutional-grade security and reporting

Introduction

Figment is on mainnet for Firedancer, Jump Crypto’s new Solana validator client. Early data suggests potentially more Solana staking rewards with a Firedancer validator. Jump Crypto’s goal with Firedancer is to be the most highly performant validator client for any blockchain. Firedancer’s North Star for performance is Transactions Per Second (TPS), with current Compute Unit limits (block size) as the main performance bottleneck. Aligned with Solana’s goals, Firedancer’s goal is to eliminate software inefficiencies and drive hardware to the limits of its performance. Figment will test and report Firedancer’s performance increases to delegator Staking Reward Rate (SRR) due to MEV rewards, transaction fees or inflation rewards while running Firedancer.

What Is Firedancer?

For clarity, the current implementation of Firedancer is “Frankendancer”. Firedancer as originally proposed, is a complete rewrite in the C programming language of Anza Lab’s Agave validator client, which is Rust-based. Per Michael McGee at Jump Crypto, certain unwritten assumptions in Agave make a 1:1 complete rewrite difficult with respect to identifying and replicating these unwritten assumptions within the codebase. As a result, Frankendancer is a modular implementation, using Agave’s TowerBFT voting consensus and a custom block engine from Jito Labs for MEV. Both Firedancer and Frankendancer are live, but Firedancer is in non-voting mode. For simplicity in this article, I’ll refer to both implementations as “Firedancer”.

Firedancer is developed by Jump Crypto to reduce Solana’s software inefficiencies and push hardware optimizations to their limits. Per Michael McGee at Jump Crypto, a dedicated team of engineers are working directly on Firedancer. Jump Crypto is a part of the broader Jump Trading Group, which brings decades of experience in algorithmic, high-frequency trading strategies and hardware optimizations. Among Jump Crypto’s goals with Firedancer are:

1. Be the most highly performance validator client, on any blockchain
2. Increase Solana validator client diversity
3. Standardize and document the Solana protocol 
4. Increase Solana’s throughput and reduce latency by eliminating software bottlenecks to drive hardware performance to its theoretical limits.

The Firedancer validator is based on a modular and high performance architecture first used in modern trading systems. Each CPU core on the system is dedicated to a single task, and interactions between CPU cores are minimized, to achieve high concurrency, maximize throughput, and reduce latency. The separation of work into individual processes running on isolated CPU cores leads to maximum hardware utilization, and also enables a highly restrictive security sandbox inspired by web browsers where each CPU core has minimal access to only the resources it needs.

What does this mean for performance though? Per reports.firedancer.io, a comparison dashboard for Solana validator client performance:

• Firedancer’s slots are “fuller” on average, using 47MM of the max 50MM Compute Units vs Agave’s 44.8MM
  • Benefit: better throughput on the network as more users’ transactions land
• Average skip rate
  • Firedancer 0.617% vs Agave 0.080% [note: this number is high for Firedancer because it includes data from experimental mainnet nodes, including nodes used to develop Firedancer validators that support DoubleZero, that are frequently restarted as part of the development process]
• For Solana delegators and validators:
  • Average transaction fees per slot
    • Higher on Firedancer at 0.039 SOL/slot vs 0.034 SOL/slot for Agave
    • Benefit: more rewards for delegators and validators
  • Average Jito MEV Tips
    • Equal at 0.041 SOL/slot
  • Avg Reward
    • 0.08 SOL/slot for Firedancer vs 0.075 SOL/slot for Agave
    • Benefit: more total rewards for delegators

While a smaller sample size, this data hints at potentially more rewards for delegators and validators who run Firedancer. Average transaction fees (priority fees per slot) are higher for Firedancer validators. In addition the average total reward per slot for validators is higher at 0.08 SOL/slot. If Firedancer continues to outperform on these metrics, delegators and validators running Firedancer receive increased Staking Reward Rates. Note: data is filtering for >400K SOL staked, the latest versions of each client, both clients running Jito, and data from July, 2025 in order to create

New 60MM Compute Unit Limit as of Epoch 822

As of Epoch 823 (July 23, 2025), SIMD-256 is live, raising Solana’s Compute Unit (CU) limits per slot by 20%, from 50MM->60MM. This is part of Solana and Anza Lab’s goal of 100MM CU limits by the end of 2025.  Per Michael McGee at Jump Crypto during Accelerate Scale or Die: “Every problem on this chain, somehow ends up being the CU limit”. With CU limits at 60MM, there is less of a throughput performance bottleneck for all of Solana and for Firedancer. We may see fuller blocks, less dropped transactions per block, and new blockbuilding execution strategies to optimize rewards. 

Firedancer Delegation Program

To support validators and help ease the transition to Firedancer, on June 9th, Jump Crypto introduced the Firedancer Delegation Program. With ~2MM SOL to be delegated to ~100 selected validators, the delegations are in progress. Each iteration is expected to run for approximately 3 months. The average delegation size is ~20,000 SOL. In order to earn stake from earn stake from the Firedancer delegation program, validators need to meet the Firedancer Delegation Program requirements: 

• Be part of the Solana Foundation Delegation Program (SFDP) and maintain good standing
• Have a minimum of 50,000 SOL delegated
• Run Frankendancer on Solana mainnet as your main client

Why Figment + Firedancer = Better for Institutions

For delegators, the early data hints at higher rewards for Solana delegators to a Firedancer validator. Figment + Firedancer allows our white-label validator clients more choice and diversity for their Solana staking offerings. Firedancer offers a robust, performant validator client and increases Solana’s validator diversity in the event of catastrophic failure in either client.

With respect to Security & Compliance, Figment is SOC 2 Type II and operates ISO 27001-certified infrastructure. We use dedicated bare-metal nodes in geographically redundant data centers. Our white-label validator clients choose their preferred Solana client and geographic location for their Solana validators. 

How to Get Started with Firedancer 

In summary, Firedancer is a new, highly performant validator client for Solana which offers increased validator diversity, a more robust validator client, “tiles” architecture for security and performance, and potentially more rewards for delegators.

To get started with a Solana Firedancer validator at Figment, please meet with us! Or delegate to Figment’s public Firedancer validator here.