Did Firedancer Pass The $TRUMP Test?

We believe the evidence suggests that Firedancer/Frankendancer has reworked and improved upon Solana’s native scheduler, which has historically been a pain point for the chain. 

If we assume that all transactions would be processed by the native client scheduler when the Jito Block Engine is off-line, then the Agave, Jito-Solana, and Frankendancer native schedulers were put to test during $TRUMP as the Jito Block Engine fell offline. Importantly, since the vast majority of transactions on Solana were to trade a single token, state contention was extremely high. This means every transaction is trying to do the same thing and hit the same state in the scheduler needs to determine what order the transactions go in - this was the ultimate test for the scheduler. Firedancer/Frankendancer outperformed in this environment, using its native scheduler. 

Looking at the data above, it’s clear Firedancer wrote a new scheduler implementation, as evidenced by its differentiated performance during the Jito Block Engine’s downtime versus both Jito-Solana and Agave. We view this as meaningful progress toward mitigating congestion issues on lowering spreads onchain.