🔥 xLabs brings Firedancer to Buenos Aires

At xLabs, we’re excited to announce that we’ve started running Firedancer, a high-performance and independent validator client for Solana, on both testnet and mainnet. Our validator is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, reinforcing our mission to empower the Latin American ecosystem and contribute to the global Solana infrastructure.

This marks a significant milestone for us and for the decentralization of the Solana network. Below, we dive into what Firedancer is, why it matters, and what this means for our validator operations.

What is Firedancer?

Firedancer is a new validator client for the Solana blockchain, developed by Jump Crypto. Unlike the original Solana Labs client, Firedancer is written from scratch in C, offering a fully independent implementation of the Solana protocol. This client introduces substantial improvements in speed, security, and resiliency.

Key Features of Firedancer:

Fast: Built with performance in mind, Firedancer leverages a concurrency model inspired by high-frequency trading systems. It reimplements core Solana components using ultra-efficient techniques to maximize throughput and minimize latency.
Secure: Its architecture minimizes system calls and isolates operations within a sandboxed environment, significantly reducing the attack surface.
Diversity: As a ground-up rewrite, Firedancer brings client diversity to Solana. This removes the reliance on Agave components and enables improvements in resilience against bugs, attacks, and supply chain vulnerabilities that may be found in shared dependencies.

For developers and node operators, the Firedancer source code and latest releases can be found here: https://github.com/firedancer-io/firedancer

Our Journey with Firedancer

Our validator in Buenos Aires acts as a bridge—showcasing Latin America’s technical contributions while supporting the Solana network’s decentralization and client diversity. You can read more about the launch of our validator and our vision here: https://blog.xlabs.xyz/xlabs-launches-solana-validator-empowering-latam-and-beyond-2/

We’ve successfully deployed Firedancer in both the Solana testnet and mainnet environments, marking a strategic step forward in our commitment to performance, decentralization, and network resilience.

We are currently running the latest releases of Frankendancer on both testnet and mainnet nodes.

Frankendancer is a transitional, hybrid version of the Firedancer client (deployed by early adopters) that runs certain Agave components in the background and is used as a key step toward full client independence on Solana.

Our testnet and mainnet deployments allow us to actively contribute feedback to the Firedancer community while also validating the client in different operational conditions.

Infrastructure Architecture

Our validator infrastructure is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and features a high-availability architecture:

Redundancy: We run two nodes in both testnet and mainnet—an active and a passive node. This dual-node setup ensures high availability and prepares us for inevitable failovers.
Automatic Failover: We’ve implemented an automated failover mechanism that activates the passive node during: scheduled upgrades, software regressions, and infrastructure anomalies or disaster recovery scenarios.
Client Switching: Our setup is flexible. We can switch back to jito-solana (Agave fork) on short notice, allowing us to mitigate any issues and maintain service reliability while exploring cutting-edge validator software.
Observability: We’ve integrated detailed telemetry dashboards across both networks to track node behavior, transaction flow, packet drop-off reasons, and system resource usage. For example, our mainnet Firedancer dashboard provides deep insights into:
- TPU Waterfall (QUIC/UDP ingress, malformed, expired, deduplicated packets)
- Live transaction per second (TPS) metrics
- Validator stake health and delinquency monitoring
- Slot leadership status and epoch timeline
Security: Validator hosts are securely sandboxed and hardened using AWS Systems Manager, enabling controlled access, and fine-grained operational oversight without direct SSH exposure.

Why It Matters

Running Firedancer aligns with our values at xLabs:

Decentralization: More independent clients means fewer single points of failure.
Innovation: We're committed to testing and supporting cutting-edge infrastructure.
Regional Empowerment: Hosting in Argentina brings validator presence closer to underrepresented regions.

With Firedancer, we’re not just running a validator—we’re helping shape the next generation of Solana infrastructure.

Stay tuned for more technical deep dives and performance benchmarks in future posts.