Fogo plots a Solana chain running ‘pure Firedancer’

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As Solana awaits promised upgrades to its performance stemming from the release of Jump’s Firedancer client, one group is already plotting to move Firedancer to its own blockchain.

Fogo Chain is a new layer-1 running on Solana’s software that will only use the Firedancer client and will implement multi-local consensus while making use of a curated validator set. Fogo’s creators think these features will help the chain — which is slated for mainnet and testnet launches in the first half of this year — push Solana’s software to its performance limits. The project is not without its detractors however.

Solana Labs developed the original Solana client. Jito forked this client and added MEV modifications that make transaction processing more lucrative. More than 90% of Solana’s stake runs on the Jito-Solana client. Chicago-based Jump, a high-frequency trading firm that has a crypto arm, was contracted by the Solana Foundation to build a high-performance Solana client from scratch. The so-called Firedancer client is still under development. A pared-down version called Frankendancer is fully live, but its lack of MEV opportunities means no one really uses it.

Fogo’s belief is that even when Firedancer goes fully live, Solana could be slowed down by validators who continue to run existing Solana clients.

“It would be like having a Ferrari but you drive it in bumper to bumper New York City traffic,” Fogo Chain co-founder Doug Colkitt said. He added that Fogo will make use of multi-local consensus, where validators can coordinate their physical locations to achieve lower latency than under Solana’s status quo, where randomly distributed validators need to reach consensus from across the world.

Fogo’s validator set will also exclude “under-provisioned” or “abusive” validator nodes, according to its white paper.

Still, the fact that Fogo plans to use Firedancer’s open source code on a different blockchain has irked some. After Fogo Chain raised $8 million at a $100 million valuation via community fundraising platform Echo, a Solana developer wrote on X, “damn you can raise 8 on 100 just by redeploying some software that you don’t understand? higher (IQs in vc please).”

Colkitt cast some of the Fogo flack as “fair” but insisted the new SVM chain is “accretive” to Solana because its experiments with pure Firedancer and multi-local consensus will gin up useful findings for Solana’s future development. Fogo will start out based on Frankendancer before transitioning to Firedancer.

Fogo isn’t the only attempt to build a new blockchain using Solana’s software. Multiple Fogo contributors are affiliated with Douro Labs, the developer behind the Solana oracle network Pyth. Douro previously built Pythnet, an application-specific blockchain for Pyth that was built as a fork of Solana’s validator software.