Last week, we hosted the first Solana community validator call for 2025 - and what a call it was! More than 150 people tuned in, and we had some great presentations during the call. Let's check out the notes.
Firedancer Development Update
The FireDancer team reported that development is going strong.
- Frankendancer:
- Frankendancer is currently at 3% stake, starting main rollout;
- Bug fixes based on validator feedback;
- Working on block engine support, and set identity - two of the most requested features;
- Performed well during the spike of launching the TRUMP and MELANIA coins.
- For the full Firedancer client, the team is working on:
- Conformance;
- Overall integration of all the components;
- Supporting new SIMDs, etc.
Asked about Jito support, the Firedancer team confirmed that the block engine supports receiving bundles from Jito. There is no exact date for the release yet.
In addition, the validator community proposed that the Firedancer team creates a debugging guide for validators who run into technical difficulties.
Double Zero Protocol Intro
Next on the agenda was a presentation on the Double Zero protocol. On the call, we had Mateo Ward - co-founder of Double Zero Network, Andrew McConnell, co-founder and CTO, and Austin Federa, head of the Double Zero Foundation.
Mateo and Austin shared their vision for the Double Zero Network to be the underlying high-performance infrastructure layer for Solana and other high-performance blockchains.
The team then had a productive Q&A session with the call participants, which we will cover in a separate article.
Introducing a SIMD to reduce Solana inflation
Next on the call was a discussion on Multicoin Capital's SIMD proposal for introducing a programmatic market based emission mechanism based on staking participation rate.
According to the proposal authors Tushar Jain and Vishal Kankani, now is a very good time to reevaluate the emission mechanism that Solana has had in place since 2021. As Vishal shared, that initial emission mechanism is a curve that was needed back in the day to incentivize the system to get off the ground - but it has no consideration about the levels of security we need today.
Essentially, the proposal stipulates that such decisions (e.g. "Are we overpaying for security?") should be evaluated by a position of power, and is proposing a metric that we can track, which is very closely related to security, if not the only metric - staking participation rate.
The SIMD was also discussed at length in a Lightspeed podcast episode that you can listen to here:
Why Solana Needs To Fix Its Inflation Rate | Tushar Jain
Community members expressed their preference for a more nuanced approach to inflation, and engaged in a discussion on why use staking participation rate instead of a total dollar value.
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