Solana developers seek to release the Firedancer upgrade in 2025, with plans to roll out preliminary versions earlier. This upgrade aims to bolster Solana's reliability and scalability in response to the escalating activity of decentralized infrastructure protocols.
Speaking at DEFICON on May 23, Kuleen Nimkar, the lead of Solana Foundation's DePIN, underscored the surge in DePIN activity and the emergence of ambitious projects. Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) employ blockchain to manage and operate physical infrastructure systems within the Solana ecosystem. Their use cases span from GPU networks to data collection initiatives. For instance, specific projects incentivize users to install browser extensions for gathering data to train large language models.
Leading protocols driving DePIN activity on Solana (SOL) include Helium, Hivemapper, and Render. Notably, data from Dune Analytics illustrates a substantial rise in Hivemapper's 'mappers.' Functioning as node operators, these mappers capture street footage using dash-mounted cameras, contributing to map creation and navigation services.
Although Solana's transaction speed and cost-effectiveness are attractive for DePIN projects, challenges like congestion and network outages have continued to persist. A significant outage in February highlighted these concerns, resulting in almost five hours of downtime for the Solana network.
Kuleen emphasized the importance of launching Firedancer, particularly noting the collaborative effort with Jump Crypto in developing an independent validator client. This initiative aims to address existing challenges and further enhance Solana's infrastructure to meet the growing demands of DePIN activities.
