Howdy!

If I was in town, I totally would have been suckered into going to Grand Central to see the Severance publicity stunt yesterday. Instead, I’ll be ginning up ten bucks to catch season two before immediately canceling my subscription again.

Today, we’ve got Frankendancer, Jito restaking, and Solana developer tooling:

Solana validators slow to adopt Frankendancer

The full version of Firedancer — a very-performant re-write of Solana’s validator software authored by Jump Crypto — may still be a ways away. But in the meantime, Solana validators still can use a limited version of the client named Frankendancer. 

Frankendancer was spawned by Jump taking the Agave client, which is descended from the original Solana Labs software, and replacing parts of it piecemeal to create a new client akin to Frankenstein’s monster. Frankendancer went to Solana mainnet in September during Solana’s Breakpoint conference — but since then, it’s seen limited uptake.

So far, 12 validators controlling roughly 5.4 million staked SOL are running Frankendancer, according to data from Validatorbase. That’s out of 392 million staked SOL in existence, according to Solana Compass.

The “main reason most validators aren't running [Frankendancer] yet is because it doesn't capture MEV efficiently,” Temporal engineering partner Ben Coverston told me.

Maximal extractible value, or MEV, is the processing of adding, removing, or reordering transactions in a block to extract extra value. Many Solana validators capture MEV by running the Jito-Solana client, which is a version of the Agave client with MEV modifications attached. 

MEV is quite lucrative for Solana validators. Around 25% of validator staking rewards — which can be thought of like the revenue a validator creates by running Solana — currently come from MEV, according to a Dune dashboard. Roughly 65% of the rewards come from SOL issuance, and 10% comes from fees. 

It’s not impossible to capture MEV without Jito, Coverston added, but it is certainly more difficult, so any validators who want to run Frankendancer are likely looking at a lower return on their investment.

That’s not to say there’s no reason to run Frankendancer. Phase Labs announced today that its validator has upgraded to the Frankendancer client, calling the software “the next leap forward” for Solana.

Phase’s Aeropool stake pool has specifically said that its stake delegation strategy is to empower positive Solana contributors rather than only chase the highest APY.

Most validators don’t share this strategy — over 93% of Solana validators currently use Jito-Solana. On testnet, they may begin seeing some pressure to try Frankendancer however: Solana developer shop Anza has talked about beginning to push for a Frankendancer supermajority of stake on testnet next week.

— Jack Kubinec

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Jito opened its restaking deposits for 24 hours:

The unlaunched restaking protocol had previously put a cap of about $50 million on deposits into its so-called vaults. Yesterday, it opted to open deposits for a finite time period instead.

In those 24 hours, Jito restaking added some $80 million in total value locked. Those are some solid deposit figures, though not quite on par with the gaudy inflows Ethereum restaking protocol EigenLayer was able to draw in its deposits heyday.

— Jack Kubinec

Solana developers, take note: Nick Frostbutter’s new CLI tool, mucho, seeks to simplify development within the ecosystem for both newcomers and veterans. With a single CLI command, developers can install an entire Solana toolkit, including Rust, Anchor, and advanced utilities like Trident and Zest.

At the core of mucho is a config-based workflow that streamlines repetitive tasks like cloning, building, and deploying accounts and programs. Some of these features enhance productivity, while others like mucho info consolidate troubleshooting data into a single command.

Takeaway: Might this be a practical entry point for new developers looking to explore and build on Solana? Mucho is only an early beta for now, but it seems to be a solid Swiss-army tool for Solana DevEx—perfect timing for scaling innovative projects in 2025?

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Arnold Lee, co-founder and CEO of Sphere: