TL;DR
A million transactions per second on a monolithic blockchain might sound like a stretch. But with the upcoming Firedancer client, Solana’s end goal of ‘synchronizing the world at the speed of light’ is getting a tad closer. If successful, this upgrade will not only reduce the downtime troubles that Solana suffered but also make consumer applications like on-chain social media within reach. Not to mention coin swaps without noticeable latency on your favorite Solana defi app.
Solana, like any other chain, has to choose their spot on the blockchain trilemma. That is the balance a chain has to pick between scalability, security, and decentralization. Ideally, a blockchain is super scalable, secure, and decentralized. In practice, you can’t have it all. For example, Web2 – the old-fashioned internet – doesn’t care about decentralization. A centralized server and database system can scale to millions of users without problems. In blockchain terms: they only need to keep one node synchronized: easy peasy.
Web3 has taken on the challenge of replicating that scalability across distributed servers and decentralized databases. There are two main approaches to achieve this: a modular and a monolithic approach. Ethereum’s rollup approach, for example, scales by separating transaction execution from transaction settlement. Transactions are executed on Layer-2s.
So, modularity means a division of labor. Solana, on the other hand, takes the monolithic approach: it doesn’t outsource but tries to take on more and more transactions per second on the base layer.
How does Solana pull it off? They are working on several optimizations. The biggest of which is a new validator client: Firedancer. Solana believes that a combination of design choices and hardware and software optimizations can achieve a 10x to 20x boost of transaction throughput. The current maximum throughput is 50,000 transactions per second. The upper limit of the Firedancer upgrade would bring a million transactions per second within reach. This is not pie in the sky. Jump Crypto already demoed these feats last year at Solana’s Breakpoint conference.
What Are Firedancer’s Improvements?
Firedancer, in development within Jump Crypto, revolves around validator client software. A validator is a special kind of full node that participates in consensus. According to the Solana website, there are currently 1800 validators online.
Being a Solana validator is not an easy task. A validator not only verifies transactions and updates that account state but also propagates and broadcasts transactions to validators across the network. The network is only as fast as you can propagate transactions.
The first technical breakthrough of Firedancer is that it implements the QUIC transaction propagation protocol. QUIC replaced Solana’s earlier and plagued transaction propagation protocol. This suffered from downtime issues resulting from a lack of proper spam filtration.
A second breakthrough comes from new ways to load balance: splitting up the processing of transaction propagation across several CPU cores within one validator, for example. Without going into details – which, frankly, your author doesn’t grasp – Firedancer uses both hardware and software-based improvements to scale load balancing to the 1 million transactions-per-second mark. In the mentioned…
Erik started as a freelance writer around the time Satoshi was brewing on the whitepaper.
As a crypto investor, he is class of 2020. More of a holder than a trader, but never shy to experiment with new protocols.
