Firedancer is a next-generation Solana validator client developed by Jump Crypto, designed for extreme throughput and low latency. With the activation of SIMD-0370, Firedancer's dominance has replaced rigid Compute Unit (CU) caps with dynamic block sizing, shifting the network's performance boundary to the hardware layer.

Under the Alpenglow consensus model, Firedancer leaders can produce blocks containing hundreds of millions of CUs within the 400ms slot time. Weaker validators (older hardware or the Agave client) may fail to process these blocks in time and "skip" voting rather than halt—introducing Verification Lag and micro-reorg risk for protocols that assume 400ms finality for liquidations or oracle updates. Auditors in 2026 must inspect time-sensitive instructions for valid-until-slot checks and slippage tolerances that account for slot-based timing variance.