Solana Firedancer dev sheds light on the project’s difficulties

Key Points

1. Firedancer, announced in 2022, is a high-performance Solana client being developed by Jump, but its progress has been slow due to engineering difficulties.

2. The biggest current obstacle is the conformance problem, requiring Firedancer's validator to perfectly match the behavior of the existing Agave client.

3. Anza's proposed consensus rewrite, Alpenglow, complicates Firedancer's development by eliminating proof-of-history, rendering some work moot.

4. Frankendancer, a related implementation, currently accounts for 9.3% of all staked SOL and has shown improved block packing efficiency.

5. Firedancer is limited by Solana's current block limit of 50 million compute units, preventing it from pushing the network's performance further in the interim.