Morning Minute | Firedancer's 1M TPS Brings Massive Speed to Solana

TylerD's Market Summary

🔥💃 Solana Firedancer Goes Live on Testnet

If you've been on Crypto Twitter over the last few months and at least somewhat in Solana circles, you've probably head of Firedancer.

It's the upgrade that is supposed to change the game for Solana.

But what is it exactly? And why does it matter?

What Happened?

Yesterday Solana Firedancer officially went live in testnet after successfully building its first block.

So what is it?

TLDR:

• -Firedancer is new validator client software used to run nodes and power the Solana blockchain
• -It's hallmark is high-performance leveraging sharding to enable max TPS (transactions per second) of 1M
• -Developed by Jump Crypto using C++ language

Foundationally validators are critical for processing blocks on the blockchain, and now Solana Node operators will have a shiny new validator option to choose.

Why It Matters

There are a couple primary reasons Firedancer is important.

• Speed and power.
  • This is an order of magnitude upgrade over current TPS on Solana and other chains (Visa's network can handle 65k TPS, ETH's is 22 TPS)
• Decentralization and security.
  • The more client validator software options that Node operators can use, the better. It lowers the impact of bugs/attacks as there are "back up" options, and also offers additional programming languages for devs to use based on their comfort.

While the decentralization factor can be debated, the speed and power are hard to look past.

It's a massive upgrade over current state and enables Solana to compete with global payment processor giants with respect to speed.

So there are reasons to be excited.

But still a long road to go.

Earlier in the year Anatoly gave 50% odds that Firedancer would be ready by Breakpoint in September and many are now predicting Q1 2025.

Whenever it goes live though, it will be a game changer.

🚚 What else is happening in NFTs?

Here is the list of other notable headlines from the day in NFTs:

• ETH led NFT trading volume with $5.4M (+3%) on the day; Solana was next with $3.8M, and then BTC with $1.9M
• ETH NFT leaders were mostly chopped on the day; Pudgy even at 10.84 ETH, BAYC +1% to 9.9, Azuki-1% to 4.1 ETH, Milady -1% at 4.8 and Doodles +15% to 2.05
• Forgoteen Runes Wizards and Sproto Gremlins were top movers on the day, jumping 20-30% each
• BTC NFT leaders were mostly red; NodeMonkes -3% at 0.762 BTC, Puppets -3% at 0.135 BTC, OMB +4% at 0.235 and Quantum Cats -1% at 0.26
• The Runes leaders saw a mix of red and green; DOG -3% at $438M mc, RSIC -1% at $85M mc, PUPS +7% at $44M
• CyberKongz' Decentralized teased that "something is coming" today for its runes, sending it +10% to $30M
• Solana NFTs mostly chopped; Mad Lads -1% at 78 SOL, SMB Gen 2 even at 31.5, DeGods -4% at 17, Tensorians even at 12.5
• The Forgotten Runiverse ETH game is migrating from Arbitrum to Ronin, joining games like Axie and Pixels
• Rekt Brands completed its equity claim, launching a souldbound NFT to celebrate

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

Here's a rundown of major token or airdrop news from the day:

🌎 Around Crypto and Web3

A few other Crypto and Web3 headlines that caught my eye:

• Crypto majors are slightly green this morning led by ETH; BTC even at $58,450; ETH +1.3% at $3,130, SOL +0.4% at $143
• Memecoin majors mostly chopped with DOGE +1%, PEPE +2%, WIF -1%, BONK -1%, MOG -1%; ROCKY, KAMA, AURA outperform
• Donald Trump is confirmed to speak at BTC Nashville coming up July 25-27
• The German government moved about 2,500 BTC this morning, bringing their reserves down to 12.9k ($750M)
• The CFTC chair said BTC and ETH are commodities (as ruled by an Illinois court), though the ruling is not binding across the country
• Goldman Sachs is set to launch 3 tokenization projects this year
• $250M of USDC was minted on Solana on Wednesday, bringing the 2-day total to $500M which incraesed USDC supply on Solana by 25% ($2.35B)
• Hypersphere launched a $130M fund using high frequency trading strategies within the crypto sector

🚀 Memecoin Movers 

• $ROCKY (+160%, $32M market cap, SOL)
• $KAMA (+135%, $12M market cap, SOL)
• $SAGE (+54%, $32M market cap, SOL) 
• $AURA (+39%, $25M market cap, SOL)
• $SPIKE (+35%, $43M market cap, SOL)

📈 NFT Floor Price Increase (ETH)

• Seraph (66%, 0.83 ETH Floor)
• Forgotten Runes Warriors (25%, 0.07 ETH)
• Forgotten Runes Wizards (22%, 0.67 ETH)
• Sproto Gremlins (22%, 0.73 ETH)
• Rumble Kong League (17%, 0.17 ETH)

🗓 Upcoming Mints and Events

Today is a busy day of mints and events.

The morning starts fast with the MOCA claim and then the CPI print at 8:30 am ET.

Then there are PFP mints on Bitcoin and a few somewhat marquee art drops on ETH from Aluan Wang and Hideki (Singularity artist).

See the full list and dive in for more details with Swizzy's daily mint monitor. 

• MOCA claim (6:00 a.m. ET)
• CPI (8:30 a.m. ET)
• BTC Bulls - DOG PFP (10:00 a.m. ET)
• arkhan - HolyMath (12:00 p.m. ET)
• Aluan Wang x Verse - Equinox (1:00 p.m. ET)
• Hideki Tsukamoto - MONUMENT (2:00 p.m. ET)

Enjoy this write-up and/or want to sponsor the Morning Minute? Follow along with me on Twitter @tyler_did_it or reach out via email to tyler.warner@luckytrader.com.