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Alpenglow consensusSolana—Alpenglow consensusSolana—Alpenglow consensusSolana—Solana mainnet & FiredancerSolana—Solana—

Solana mainnet & Firedancer

by SolanaUSCH

ScalingStage 5 of 5

Mainnet runs Agave and Firedancer clients; Firedancer runs a growing share of stake.

Updated Dec 2025Checked 25 Sep0 updates this week

Milestones

No announced next step
  1. Mainnet beta launch16 Mar 2020Complete.
  2. ~17-hour outage from transaction flood14 Sep 2021Complete.
  3. Frankendancer hybrid client on mainnetSep 2024Complete.
  4. Full Firedancer client live on mainnetDec 2025Complete.

Most important updates

  • Dec 2025
  • Sep 2024
  • 6 Feb 2024
  • 14 Sep 2021
  • 16 Mar 2020

Current obstacles

  • Staying up under loadPast halts needed validators to restart together. A second client lowers but doesn't remove the risk.

Physics limits

  • Hardware sets the throughput ceilingEvery validator must execute each block within ~400 ms. Throughput is capped by the CPU, memory and network speed of the machines the network wants to keep, not by the protocol alone.
  • Hot accounts can't be parallelTransactions that write the same account, like a popular trading pool, must run one after another. Such hot spots cap throughput no matter how many cores a validator has.
  • State must stay fast to readHundreds of gigabytes of account state must be read in microseconds, so it lives in RAM and fast SSDs. Growth raises validator costs; fees and compression slow it but don't stop it.

How it works

4 parts
Inside a rack server: Solana validators are powerful many-core machines that run non-overlapping transactions side by side
Inside a rack server: Solana validators are powerful many-core machines that run non-overlapping transactions side by sidePhoto: Patrik Kernstock · Unsplash License (opens unsplash.com)
Leaders

A published leader schedule

Validators take turns as leader for four ~400 ms slots each, on a schedule known in advance, so wallets send transactions straight to the next leader.

Parallel runtime

Transactions run side by side

Each transaction lists the accounts it will touch, so the runtime can run non-overlapping transactions at the same time on many CPU cores.

Turbine

Blocks spread through a tree

The leader cuts blocks into small coded packets and relays them through a tree of validators, so no node must send a whole block to everyone.

Clients

Two independent clients

Agave (Rust) and Firedancer (C) implement the same rules separately, so a bug in one client is less likely to halt the whole network.

Papers & demos

1 item
  1. Nov 2017paper
    Solana: A new architecture for a high performance blockchain (opens solana.com)Original whitepaper introducing Proof of History.

Update log

5 updates

Dec 2025

  • Major: PressSoftware

Sep 2024

  • Minor: PressSoftware

Tue 6 Feb 2024

  • Minor: BlogOther

Tue 14 Sep 2021

  • Major: BlogOther

Mon 16 Mar 2020

  • Major: OtherSoftware

About Solana

The team behind Solana mainnet & Firedancer

Solana

Fast L1 blockchain, Firedancer, Alpenglow

Fast blockchain that runs many transactions in parallel on one shared ledger, with ~400 ms blocks. Maintained by Solana Labs, the Solana Foundation and client teams incl. Anza and Jump Crypto. A new voting system, Alpenglow, aims to cut finality from ~12.8 s to ~150 ms.

  • Jump Crypto's Firedancer client went live in Dec 2025, so Solana no longer depends on one software client.
  • Validators approved the Alpenglow rewrite in Sept 2025. It's expected to go live with client v4.3.
  • Multi-hour outages in 2021-2022 and Feb 2024 drove investment in a second client and networking fixes.

solana.com (opens solana.com)Company profile →

Founded
20188 yrs
Headquarters
United StatesSwitzerland
Status
Private
Valuation
private
Works in
CryptoBlockchains (L1s)
Coverage
2 programs · 11 updateslatest 15d agochecked 25 Sep
Partners
Jump Crypto (opens jumpcrypto.com)Anza (opens anza.xyz)
People
Anatoly Yakovenko (opens en.wikipedia.org)Co-founder, Solana LabsRaj GokalCo-founder, Solana LabsLily LiuPresident, Solana Foundation
Primer