Jump Crypto
Richard Patel
Jun 2026
Jump Crypto's Richard Patel talks to Karl Loomes about Firedancer, and why its rollout could power Solana to support tokenised securities, real‑time price feeds, and high‑frequency trading, helping shift institutional capital markets onto open blockchains
Image: Jump Crypto
What led you to Firedancer?
I was drawn to crypto as a place where opensource code could reach people at scale. My first real project came when Binance acquired Trust Wallet, released the codebase publicly, and I rewrote much of the backend infrastructure, unpaid, to watch code I built run quietly in millions of people's financial lives. That work became the foundation for my next chapter at Blockdaemon, a US startup helping develop infrastructure necessary for large institutions to access crypto for the first time. I further developed that open-source infrastructure into a professional product serving all major blockchains.
At Blockdaemon, Solana kept surfacing as a distinct challenge. Other chains could run in the cloud or even on consumer hardware, but Solana required physical servers and resource requirements in a different category entirely. What looked like a weakness was a signal: the protocol was trying to push throughput to its physical limits, not just market itself as fast. I dug into the existing codebase and became convinced it needed to be rewritten from scratch — a view that I believed was unique at the time — and began building under a project called Radiance.
Two months in, I discovered that Jump Crypto had independently reached the same conclusion and was also building a rewrite of their own. Excited by the prospect of working with a world-class team on the same project, I joined forces with them, and our convergence became the genesis of Firedancer.
What is Firedancer, and why does it matter for Solana?
Firedancer is a high-performance Solana validator client built independently of the original implementation, written from scratch in C with a focus on security, reliability, and performance. I like to think of it as a civil engineering project, where the most important work is happening underground in places most users will never see, but
whose infrastructure is critical. The original client worked at the time but would not be able to scale to the demands of institutions looking to bring more capital markets activity on-chain. Firedancer is, in many ways, the answer to that problem. It brings the rigour of some of the highest-performance exchange infrastructure to a public blockchain.
Both Solana and Firedancer continue to iterate in their design and demands throughout this process, which has not been a static build but a constantly evolving, high performance blockchain to support current demand as well as where we believe permissionless systems can grow towards.
As we have found constraints in this process, we have found new and cutting-edge solutions to build through them. Reliability, security, and performance continue to be the guiding philosophy throughout. The work in rebuilding a live protocol from scratch and watching it get adopted continues to be the most fulfilling work I have done.
How does Firedancer fit into Solana’s broader effort to accelerate blockchain adoption?
Trading of any traditional financial asset already happens close to the speed of light. After decades of optimisation by firms in the industry, physical limits have effectively been reached.
The next frontier isn't shaving nanoseconds off a wire; it's reducing the number of intermediaries sitting between a buyer and a seller. That's what public blockchains are competing on, and it's why the performance bar for a chain like Solana must match what Wall Street already takes for granted.
Firedancer is a large part of this transition. Resource requirements at the validator level remain high, and the public internet isn't always equipped to carry what the protocol is trying to do. That reality is part of what prompted DoubleZero, afirst-of-its-kind, decentralised network developed by contributors, including Jump Crypto, and purpose-built for markets and systems that have reached the limits of what the public internet can offer.
Where does Firedancer stand today?
We've been running a hybrid version of Firedancer for nearly two years. The full unveil aims to ramp up adoption without compromising Solana’s performance or long-term health. Solana already offers competitive, and in some cases superior, all-in prices for exchange pairs compared to any global centralised or decentralised venue. The adoption of Firedancer is essential for empowering the Solana blockchain to manage the high volume and speed demanded by next-generation financial applications and making it a viable competitor to traditional financial venues. We look forward to sharing what’s next for the client.
Why is now such an important moment for the network?
Solana is one of the few protocols to have delivered on its original goal of highthroughput financial infrastructure capableof performing under real-world conditions. Solana’s north star has been to build towards ‘Nasdaq onchain’.
Jump recognised early that public blockchains would eventually outperform centralised venues, and that conviction enabled Solana to move beyond previously accepted throughput limits.
The qualities that initially drew me to Solana continue to sustain my interest, and this is an opportunity to showcase those same qualities to a broader audience.
Solana's capacity to push beyond established limits is what makes it a transformative force for accelerating blockchain adoption.
The civil engineering work is largely done. What comes next is scaling the use cases: tokenised securities, onchain price dissemination, high-frequency trading at a scale that not just enables but motivates institutional capital and markets to move towards permissionless blockchains.
The groundwork is in place, and the priority is to keep iterating rather than stand still.
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