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# Firedancer & Co-location

The Infrastructure Edge.

**Co-location as a Strategy:**\
Datacenter selection is not a matter of convenience; it is a core strategic decision. Our analysis of stake concentration shows that a significant portion of Jito validators are located in European hubs, primarily Frankfurt. By placing our **bare-metal servers** in these same facilities, we minimize the physical distance to block producers. This reduces network Round-Trip Times (RTT) from tens of milliseconds (for a transatlantic connection) to mere **microseconds**, creating an insurmountable advantage.

**Firedancer as a Weapon:**\
The standard Solana client was not built for HFT. **Firedancer** is a complete rewrite from the ground up, targeting maximum performance. For us, two of its features are key:

1. **High-throughput Networking Stack:** Firedancer processes the incoming shred stream and TPU traffic more efficiently, allowing us to access data several critical milliseconds sooner.
2. **Efficient Deserialization:** Its architecture enables faster conversion of raw network packets into usable transaction data, shortening our internal processing loop.


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