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Crypto Insight
26-07-2025
- Business
- Crypto Insight
Firedancer will speed up Solana, but it won't reach full potential
Solana's next-generation validator client, Firedancer, may not reach full speed on the network it was built for as technical limits push developers to test it elsewhere. One of those developers is Douglas Colkitt, a former high-frequency trader who's testing a hybrid validator setup called Frankendancer on Fogo, a Solana-compatible chain built to remove the constraints that currently prevent Firedancer from reaching its full potential on Solana. Colkitt, a founding contributor at Fogo, said the new blockchain isn't trying to replace Solana but does discard some of Solana's core assumptions, such as globally distributed validator sets, to showcase how far Firedancer can go when speed takes priority over decentralization. The push to run Firedancer outside Solana highlights a deeper split in blockchain infrastructure: the tension between decentralization and speed. These two have long been trade-offs, but more builders are now choosing to prioritize speed. Why Firedancer can't go full speed on Solana yet Jump Trading developed Firedancer, a high-performance validator client aimed at boosting Solana's throughput and reducing latency. But according to Colkitt, Solana's architecture includes technical constraints that limit how fast Firedancer can operate in practice. 'If you have two clients running on the same network, you can only go as fast as the slowest client because otherwise the network risks halting,' he told Cointelegraph. 'It's like driving a Ferrari in city traffic — no matter how fast the car is, you're limited by the speed of the other vehicles around you.' Solana currently supports two main validator client implementations: Agave and Firedancer. Agave is running on about 90% of validators as of Friday. Meanwhile, Firedancer is still in a transitional phase as Frankendancer, a hybrid combining Agave and Firedancer. It accounts for about 10% of validators, up from 7% in April. Frankendancer's hybrid approach allows for a gradual adoption of Firedancer's improvements without risking network stability. Solana's network relies on a globally distributed set of validators. This geographic decentralization strengthens security by preventing any single party or region from gaining excessive control. It also enhances censorship resistance and resilience against localized outages or attacks. This also means that decentralization comes with performance trade-offs. Data and consensus messages must travel long distances, resulting in unavoidable network latency. Even with optimized software like Frankendancer and the fastest hardware, Solana's block time remains around 400 milliseconds. 'Trading firms absolutely need something faster than 400 milliseconds. If you have events like a [Federal Reserve] announcement or nonfarm payrolls, you want to be closer to that data to trade off of it,' Colkitt said. Solana is also working to reduce latency. On Thursday, the Solana Foundation unveiled a roadmap aiming to establish the 'Internet Capital Market' by 2027, targeting millisecond-level control over transaction ordering in smart contracts. Firedancer's real-world test outside Solana Colkitt traces his entry into crypto back to 'DeFi Summer.' He was working on an automated market maker project on Ethereum and its emerging rollups. 'The Ethereum chains weren't sufficient for what we wanted to do,' Colkitt said, explaining why he left the Ethereum ecosystem in search of alternatives better suited for high-frequency trading. 'We spent a lot more time playing politics — which L2 do we go to? How do we get L2 support? — that kind of distracted from building the core products.' This fragmentation held back innovation compared to the simplicity and unified liquidity of early Ethereum, Colkitt said, which was more apparent in Solana. However, Solana is still relatively young. It produced its first block in March 2020. Traditional financial institutions are slower in embracing newer blockchain platforms like Solana, Colkitt said, adding that banks still remain comfortable primarily within Ethereum-compatible ecosystems. On the demand side, Colkitt pointed to projects like Hyperliquid, which push the limits of current blockchain infrastructure. 'Hyperliquid owns 90% plus of the market in decentralized perpetuals trading,' he noted. 'But that kind of ultra-low latency, high-throughput trading experience just doesn't reliably work on Solana today because of block times and network stability.' Fogo, which launched its testnet on Tuesday, uses Solana-based technology to compete with chains like Hyperliquid. Built on the Solana Virtual Machine, it is compatible with projects currently running on Solana. Fogo currently runs on Frankendancer, with plans to transition fully to Firedancer when ready, unlocking the validator client's full potential. When asked about the timeline, Colkitt gave a 'very rough guess' of the end of this year. Fogo is targeting its mainnet launch in September. Firedancer's true potential outside Solana Next-generation low-latency networks like Fogo and Hyperliquid are pushing the boundaries to match the speed demands of modern trading. Projects like MegaETH also promise near-instant transactions, targeting emerging sectors such as decentralized physical infrastructure nextworks that require real-time execution. What unites these chains is a willingness to make trade-offs, dialing back decentralization to scale. Fogo intentionally reduces the geographic distribution of validators to gain this speed advantage. 'What we're doing with Fogo is spinning up validator nodes in a few key global locations — Tokyo, London and New York — to reduce latency between them,' he said. 'By co-locating validators closer together geographically, we can push Firedancer to achieve much faster block times than Solana's globally distributed validator set allows.' This trade-off sets the stage for an important experiment. Firedancer's true potential will likely never be fully unlocked on Solana itself, a network that remains constrained by its global validator set and commitment to decentralization. Instead, the testbed for what ultra-fast, high-performance blockchain infrastructure can truly achieve comes at the cost of decentralization. However, Solana is not standing still. Its recently unveiled 2027 roadmap aims to bring the blockchain closer to traditional finance standards. Source:
Crypto Insight
13-06-2025
- Business
- Crypto Insight
Crypto has killed the weekend: Hedge funds quietly scramble to adapt
The always-on crypto market is reshaping global finance, pushing hedge funds and trading firms to look beyond traditional hours and staff desks through the weekend. Qube Research & Technologies, a global quantitative investment management firm headquartered in London, is hiring for a 'Crypto | Quant Trader (Weekend Shift)' role in London, which requires weekend availability in addition to a four-day workweek. The role, which includes overseeing continuous crypto trading, monitoring strategy performance and risks and implementing signals and data sets, requires working every other weekend and a normal day shift four days per week. Unlike traditional financial markets that operate on fixed schedules and close on weekends, the crypto market runs 24/7. There are no closing bells, holidays or after-hours sessions, and price movements can happen at any time, even during weekends. TradFi firms hire for weekend crypto roles Other traditional finance firms are also expanding crypto hiring to cover weekends. American high-frequency trading company Virtu Financial is seeking a weekend trader in Singapore to cover digital asset activity outside of weekday trading windows. Jump Trading's crypto division was looking to hire a weekend trader in Chicago. The position is currently not available, suggesting the company might have found the right candidate. The rise in weekend crypto roles comes as major hedge funds and trading firms are building crypto teams and infrastructure to operate around the clock. Brevan Howard's dedicated crypto unit, BH Digital, now boasts dozens of staff, including over 15 portfolio managers, more than 10 data scientists/traders and 20 external engineers supporting its strategies. Steve Cohen's hedge fund, Point72, is similarly expanding. Its Cubist quant division is hiring a crypto-focused quantitative developer in Paris. In a March report, CoinShares revealed that seven of the top 10 largest holders of Bitcoin ETF shares are now hedge funds. 'Hedge funds alone now account for 41% of all 13-F Bitcoin ETF holdings, surpassing investment advisers for the first time,' the firm wrote. Crypto remains volatile on weekends Crypto continues to show volatility during weekends. In April, crypto prices tumbled after a Friday tariff announcement by US President Donald Trump. The decline continued over the weekend, which saw Bitcoin drop 7%, to $77,000 from $83,000. Crypto markets can also turn extremely volatile during weekends if hacks or breaches occur. With thinner liquidity and limited staffing, exploits timed for late Friday or Saturday can trigger rapid sell-offs, leading to sharp price drops. While hedge funds are only now hiring for weekend roles, crypto traders have long operated without breaks. 'Weekends are for working. Free time? No such thing, work time. Save your free time for the bear. For now, we grind,' altcoin trader Altcoin Gordon wrote on X. Source:
Bloomberg
30-05-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Jump India Said to Hire Akhtar From IMC in Top Technology Role
Jump India, the local arm of global market maker Jump Trading, has hired Javed Akhtar to lead its technology division, according to people familiar with the matter. Akhtar, whose title hasn't been finalized, will join later this year, the people said, asking not to be named as the information is private. The software engineer had been at IMC India since 2008 and was based in Amsterdam, Chicago and Sydney before moving back to India to serve as the firm's technology lead, according to his LinkedIn profile. He will remain in Mumbai.
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How Jump and Solana vets are building a hyper fast internet for blockchains
High-frequency traders are the whiz kids of Wall Street. They either code scripts to execute quick trades to eke out small profits that, multiplied by one or ten thousand times over, result in serious cash. Or they're able to act milliseconds faster than competitors to score big bets on market swings. Speed is paramount, which is why HFT traders have created their own private networks of internet cables—now, a crypto project called DoubleZero wants to do the same to speed up blockchains. 'We can use a whole different set of technologies that have basically been standard and de facto in the high-frequency trading world… but are not available over the public internet, so they've never been applied to blockchain before,' Austin Federa, cofounder of DoubleZero and a former executive at the Solana Foundation, told Fortune. Federa's project, which has the same obsession with speed as the firms in Michael Lewis's famous HFT book Flash Boys, has already attracted capital. DoubleZero Foundation, one of the entities behind the project, announced in early March that it had raised $28 million in a seed round led by marquee crypto investors Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital. Other venture capital firms that contributed were Foundation Capital, Reciprocal Ventures, DBA, Borderless Capital, Superscrypt, and Frictionless. In exchange for their cash, investors received token warrants, or promised allocations of a yet-to-be-launched cryptocurrency, Federa said. CoinDesk Solana or Ethereum are like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud—but decentralized. And like any cloud computing network, blockchains have physical servers that process users' transactions and run programmers' apps. Currently, when servers that power the Solana blockchain, for example, need to communicate with each other, those signals run over public internet infrastructure, said Federa. DoubleZero aims to create a private network of cables to speed up a blockchain's processing power. Jump Crypto, the digital assets subsidiary of HFT firm Jump Trading, and Malbec Labs are the engineering entities behind DoubleZero. They won't be laying down physical cables to construct the network, said Federa. Not yet, anyway. Rather, the company is cobbling together underutilized bandwidth from HFT firms, private companies, and even individuals to build out a faster physical network of cables than what is currently available for blockchains. And to make sure that, just like a blockchain, this physical network is decentralized, Federa's foundation plans to launch its own cryptocurrency to reward those who contribute bandwidth to the project. Federa's other cofounders are Mateo Ward and Andrew McConnell. Ward is the former CEO of Neutrona Networks, a portfolio company of Jump Trading that specialized in building private internet networks. And McConnell was a former top engineer at Jump. This story was originally featured on Sign in to access your portfolio
