[MYBW26 Learning Lab] Firedancer: Solana’s Path to 1M TPS — by Whitepaper Reading Club

[MYBW26 Learning Lab] Whitepaper Reading Club EP12: Firedancer

Solana's speed is often treated as a finished story, but the validator client underneath is still being rebuilt. Firedancer is an independent validator client written from scratch in C by Jump Crypto. It went live on mainnet in December 2025, after roughly 100 days of quiet block production on a handful of validators. It is real infrastructure now, not a demo.

We are going past the headline number. Firedancer's own docs are blunt that network throughput is bounded by things the TPS benchmark never measures, starting with how fast the slowest nodes can replay. So what is the actual engineering claim, and what changes if it lands?

What we'll cover:

The tile architecture. Fifteen kinds of tile, one CPU core each, talking over shared memory queues, forming the pipeline a transaction actually travels: net, quic, verify, dedup, pack, bank, poh, shred, store.

Speed and safety from the same design. Kernel bypass networking with zero copy I/O, and tiles sandboxed down to almost no system calls.

Frankendancer versus full Firedancer. The hybrid kept Agave for execution and consensus, which tells you where the hard parts are.

Client diversity as a safety argument, the counter argument that two implementations create two ways to disagree about state, and what Alpenglow does to both.

Paper / source:

Firedancer has no traditional whitepaper. The documentation is the paper, and it is unusually good. We will be reading from:

Firedancer Docs, Internals and Performance Tuning sections: https://docs.firedancer.io

Firedancer repository and README: https://github.com/firedancer-io/firedancer

Primer for context: Helius, "What is Firedancer?" https://www.helius.dev/blog/what-is-firedancer

Session Guides:

Who should come: Engineers, validator operators, researchers, and anyone curious about how a blockchain actually processes a transaction at the systems level. No Solana experience required. If you have run infrastructure, written C, or argued about client diversity on any chain, you will find something here.

Format

Short introduction and context setting to start.

A short walkthrough of the paper and its key ideas.

Questions and discussion grounded in the original source.

Moderator-led discussion with no promotions.

About Whitepaper Reading Club

We are a community of founders, researchers, and builders across Singapore, Malaysia, San Francisco, Bangkok, New York, Lagos, Taipei, and Hong Kong. We meet in person every month to read, discuss, and pressure-test the latest blockchain papers, protocols, and technical ideas.

Learn more: Website · Summaries · Calendar

We create detailed, easy-to-understand summaries for each paper and have held 80+ sessions since June 2023, covering Account Abstraction, Parallel Chains, EIPs, the Bitcoin ecosystem, and AI x Crypto. We are ecosystem-agnostic, not for profit, and focused on projects with technical, product, or social innovation.