Solana
Anatoly Yakovenko presents Solana Post-Firedancer
The Solana co-founder says the network has the opportunity to become the leading monolithic chain in Web3.
In a panel closing the first day of Solana Crossroads 2024 conferenceSolana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko said Solana is poised to become the leading Web3 network.
Yakovenko said Solana would have officially transcended its “mainnet beta” with the imminent launch of Firedancer – Jump Crypto’s next Solana client. Firedancer features an entirely new codebase intended to eliminate the risk posed by Solana’s current single-client implementation, increase transaction throughput, and increase network efficiency.
“People can stop calling it beta at any time, it’s just my personal preference that we do this after Firedancer comes out,” Yakovenko said. “You want different people working on the same component, so the likelihood of a bug occurring in both [clients] is practically zero.
Yakovenko said Jump has “made a lot of progress” on Firedancer, adding that he expects there to be a 50% chance Firedancer will be live on mainnet before the Solana Breakpoint conference in September.
Jump to Crypto First announcement it was building Firedancer in August 2022. Jump said it would design the client to “significantly scale”[e] The throughput, resilience and efficiency of the Solana network.
Although Solana currently enjoys impressive throughput, the network has struggled to frequent breakdowns and the perceptions of centralization during the last years.
Memecoin Strength Tests
Looking ahead, Yakovenko predicts that Solana will grow to host over $1 trillion worth of stablecoins over the next five years.
He called the bottleneck challenges Solana has faced so far as “a blessing,” because memecoinsNFTs and listings served to test the network, rather than a huge stablecoin ecosystem.
“We have the chance to do stress tests with memecoins, not with stablecoins worth $1 trillion,” Yakovenko said. “We’re lucky to find these bugs and fix them.”
Yakovenko also reaffirmed Solana’s commitment to achieving scalability at Layer 1, as opposed to the “fragmented” Layer 2 ecosystem that determines Ethereum’s scalability. He said Solana’s design aims to facilitate future scalability gains through hardware efficiency gains, highlighting the rapid pace of innovation in semiconductor manufacturing from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and from Nvidia.
“This is an opportunity for a single giant global computer that synchronizes at the speed of light,” Yakovenko said.