Firedancer is a new validator client for Solana.

• Fast Designed from the ground up to be fast. The concurrency model draws from experience in the low latency trading space, and the code contains many novel high-performance reimplementations of core Solana primitives.
• Secure The architecture of the validator allows it to run with a highly restrictive sandbox and almost no system calls.
• Independent Firedancer is written from scratch. This brings client diversity to the Solana network and helps it stay resilient to supply chain attacks in build tooling or dependencies.

If you are an operator or looking to run the validator, see the Getting Started guide in the Firedancer docs

If you are an operator looking to run the validator, see the Releases Guide in the documentation.

The Firedancer project is producing two validators,

• Frankendancer A hybrid validator using parts of Firedancer and parts of Agave. Frankendancer uses the Firedancer networking stack and block production components to perform better while leader. Other functionality including execution and consensus is using the Agave validator code.
• Firedancer A full from-scratch Firedancer with no Agave code.

Both validators are built from this codebase.

Firedancer currently only supports Linux and requires a relatively new kernel, at least v4.18 to build.

$ git clone https://github.com/firedancer-io/firedancer.git
$ cd firedancer
$ ./deps.sh                        # install system dependencies
$ make -j                          # build `firedancer-dev`
$ ./build/firedancer-dev --testnet # join testnet

firedancer-dev (without args) configures your system for validator operation and creates a new local development cluster. First it creates a genesis block, some keys, a faucet, and then it starts a validator on the local machine. firedancer-dev will use sudo to make privileged changes to system configuration where needed. If sudo is not available, you may need to run the command as root.