Solana eyes 2025 for Firedancer release as DePIN activity increases
Solana plans to release the full version of the Firedancer update in 2025, according to Kulin Nimkar, head of DP at the Solana Foundation.
The purpose of the update is to increase Solana's overall reliability and scalability as network traffic continues to grow over decentralized infrastructure protocols. “We're seeing a lot of really deep and deep projects that are doing everything,” Coughlin said of the DePIN activity at DEFICON on May 23.
DePIN, or Decentralized Physical Infrastructure, refers to the use of blockchain to manage and operate physical infrastructure systems.
According to Culin, DePIN uses protocols in the Solana ecosystem that work on decentralized energy solutions — from homeowners creating interconnected virtual power plants to GPU networks and data collection. For example, some projects encourage users to install browser extensions that crawl the Internet and train large language models.
Protocols that implement Depin activity on Solana include Helium, HiveMapper, and Render. Data from Dune Analytics shows a significant increase in Hivemapper's ‘mappers' by 2024, from around 30,000 drivers connected in May to 67,000.
As intersection operators on the Hivemapper protocol, mappers use dash-mounted cameras to capture video images of roads and intersections while driving. This video data is used for maps used for various purposes, including navigation. Maps incentivize contributions through rewards in the protocol's native token. Coughlin observed:
“We've all had the experience of looking at a street view and thinking, ‘This doesn't look like my neighborhood at all. That's because of how Street View is created, mostly through Google-owned cars. But owning and managing a fleet of cars is expensive. It's much cheaper to pay people who drive cars to collect that data anyway.
Solana's transaction speed and low cost are said to be a boost for DPin projects, but congestion and network outages are still a challenge for developers. In the year
“One thing we're really focused on is getting FireDancer live,” Coughlin said of the independent verifier being developed by Jump Crypto.
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