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.