C/C++ Will Make You Jump, Jump

Market Meditations | January 27, 2023

Solana has gotten a pretty bad rap in recent months. The price of SOL had already suffered a pretty significant decline from the all-time high when the FTX scandal occurred.  The fact that Alameda and FTX were holding such large bags of SOL seemed a likely death blow. So far, their vibrant NFT marketplace has served as a life raft and  Jump Crypto is planning to throw them a lifeline. 

  • Jump Crypto is a high-frequency trading firm specializing in high-performance computing at scale and network optimization. 
  • They are using their expertise in the field to build an open-source validator client for Solana known as Firedancer. Firedancer should help improve Solana’s resiliency, efficiency, and increase decentralization.
  • Although Solana is written in the Rust language, Firedancer will be implemented in C/C++, which will optimize high-frequency trading activity on-chain.

According to Jump’s president Kanav Kariya, a backup validator client like Firedancer could have prevented the numerous outages suffered by Solana over the last 12 months. The new infrastructure for Solana could not have come at a better time, with L1 competition growing daily.