[SEJeff]

It’s a new from scratch implementation of a validator for Solana the fastest blockchain by several orders of magnitude. The slowest part is signature verification so they sped up hashing to improve performance of the entire system.

They follow a first principles approach (the lead has a few physics degrees) and opted to speed up the cryptography. The beauty of this, despite the bad views on blockchain, is that they freaking sped up the cryptography of commonly used algorithms more than anything open or closed source that I personally am aware of.

It’s a win in cryptography, much like this Amazon post is, except it’s slower than the firedancer implementation.

[scrlk]

Off topic - is Firedancer going to survive Jump winding down its crypto arm?

Kanav left, they liquidated a huge staked ETH position a few months ago (+ a bunch of other coins), and the SEC/CFTC is all over them for the Terra Luna fiasco.

[SEJeff]

Rumors of Jump’s demise are greatly exaggerated. Check the torrent of firedancer talks at Solana Breakpoint literally next week and decide yourself.

Folks have said jump is gonna die for 20+ years. They’ve been around 30ish…

[sangnoir]

Parent asked a specific question about the survival of Firedancer and winding down of the crypto arm though. No demise of Jump mentioned.

[SEJeff]

You will see a half dozen or so talks about firedancer and probably 35-40 or so of us total (I’m at the company that does security for firedancer, Asymmetric Research. We were founded by former jumpers).

You can make the determination on your own, but there will be an obvious large showing of firedancer folks and some exciting updates for the project.

[caned]

> The beauty of this, despite the bad views on blockchain, is that they freaking sped up the cryptography of commonly used algorithms more than anything open or closed source that I personally am aware of.

For users that have AVX-512, which isn't widely available (AMD Zen 4 / Zen 5, Sapphire Rapids)...

[SEJeff]

Sure, and cpus supporting it will proliferate. Shockingly to no one reading hacker news... Both software and hardware continue to improve with time generally speaking. This was a huge software improvement on hardware that supports that functionality. It is a huge win for anyone wanting to use these algorithms where they can afford hardware that supports it.

We should celebrate Amazon's improvements and we should celebrate these improvements. Both are great for the future of technology, regardless of why they were initially developed. Improving tech and keeping it open source is good for all.