The State Of Firedancer, Building Thru & How To 10x Performance | Liam Heeger
🎯 Summary
Podcast Episode Summary: The State Of Firedancer, Building Thru & How To 10x Performance | Liam Heeger
This 47-minute episode features Jack Cubanek interviewing Liam Heeger, co-founder of Unto Labs, the team building the new Layer 1 blockchain Threw. The discussion centers on Heeger’s transition from a core engineer at FireDancer (Jump Crypto’s high-performance Solana client) to launching his own project, detailing the architectural philosophy behind Threw, and critiquing the limitations of existing high-throughput chains like Solana.
1. Focus Area
The primary focus is Blockchain Architecture and Performance Optimization, specifically contrasting the single-leader model (Solana) with novel, leaderless consensus mechanisms. Key themes include Virtual Machine design (adopting RISC-V), incentive alignment for validators, and achieving high throughput without fixed block times, drawing parallels to traditional financial markets.
2. Key Technical Insights
- Threw VM based on RISC-V: Threw is building a new Virtual Machine using the open-source RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). The main driver is not just performance, but maximizing developer optionality by supporting a wide range of existing languages (C, C++, Rust, Zig, etc.) directly.
- Leaderless Consensus Mechanism: Threw is designed to be completely leaderless, moving away from single-leader (Solana) or multiple-concurrent-leader (MCL) models. Block production is open to anyone (with a minimal token stake), while validators are separate and focus solely on voting and security.
- Dynamic Block Finalization: Threw rejects fixed block times (like Solana’s 400ms slots). Instead, block finalization is determined by market dynamics—a continuous process where validators choose blocks based on the price per resource (compute) offered by the block producer, mirroring the bursty nature of traditional markets.
3. Market/Investment Angle
- Demand Outstrips Supply: Heeger emphasizes that the demand for high-throughput, on-chain products is rapidly increasing, creating a critical supply gap in block space that current L1s cannot adequately fill.
- Incentive Alignment for Performance: The design actively combats the PoS incentive mismatch where capital accumulation doesn’t necessarily align with network performance. Threw aims to align validator profit directly with network speed and user service quality.
- Zero/Low Fee Transactions: The architecture enables applications to offer near-zero fee transactions by allowing block producers (who can be the applications themselves) to front the small block production fee paid to validators.
4. Notable Companies/People
- Liam Heeger: Co-founder of Unto Labs, ex-core engineer at FireDancer.
- FireDancer (Jump Crypto): Mentioned as a noble but difficult effort due to building against a constantly changing specification (a “moving target”).
- Vitalik Buterin: Mentioned regarding the concept of Ethereum potentially moving to RISC-V, though Heeger notes their implementation focuses on native performance rather than layering on EVM history.
- Max Resnick: Mentioned in the context of supporting MCL solutions, which Heeger disagrees with as merely creating an oligopoly.
- Temporal (Ben): Mentioned as a source for insights regarding transaction spam and block jitter on existing chains.
5. Regulatory/Policy Discussion
No direct regulatory discussion occurred, but the context of increasing demand for on-chain products (referenced by a recent bill passing) underscores the growing importance of scalable infrastructure in the face of regulatory interest.
6. Future Implications
The conversation suggests a future where high-performance blockchains move away from rigid, fixed-time slot mechanisms toward event-driven, dynamic processing that better reflects real-world market activity. The adoption of RISC-V could significantly broaden the developer ecosystem for new L1s beyond the current Rust/Solana or Solidity/EVM dominance.
7. Target Audience
This episode is highly valuable for Blockchain Engineers, Protocol Architects, Web3 Developers, and Crypto Investors/Analysts focused on L1 scalability solutions, consensus mechanisms, and the technical trade-offs between different high-throughput designs.
Comprehensive Summary
The podcast opens by framing Liam Heeger’s journey: leaving the high-profile FireDancer project at Jump Crypto to co-found Unto Labs and build the Threw blockchain, a move that resulted in a settled legal dispute over non-compete clauses. Heeger first addresses the challenges of building FireDancer, noting the extreme difficulty of engineering against a moving target (Solana’s evolving core code) and the inherent risks of client monoculture, even while acknowledging the positive impact FireDancer has had on Solana’s testing rigor.
The central thesis is that Solana is not performant enough to meet escalating demand. Heeger argues that while Solana is fast, the fundamental architecture—specifically the single-leader monopoly over block space for 1.6 seconds—is inherently limiting.
He then details the technical innovations of Threw. The core is the Threw VM, built from the ground up using the RISC-V ISA. This choice prioritizes broad developer accessibility by natively supporting languages like C++, Rust, and Zig, rather than focusing solely on micro-optimizations over the existing EVM structure.
The most significant departure is in consensus. Threw is completely leaderless. Block producers can be anyone willing to post a small stake, and they compete to offer the
🏢 Companies Mentioned
đź’¬ Key Insights
"I think the most slept-on thing for any blockchain is the read layer observability. And in fact, it's actually has nothing to do with the chain itself."
"What they would do is they still have to maybe take some of their token, turn it back into native tokens and pay for the block space in the competitive environment that is going to be out there, right? So they still have to actually pay for the block space. And so, and it's not just data availability, right? This is actual execution, right? So that's not the same problem as the L2 conundrum that's currently rocking the Ethereum ecosystem."
"I'm really bullish on a lot of the new regulation. I think it's the right direction for the industry. I think that will be a huge benefit to us with the more regulatory clarity. It helps my co-founder and I can sleep at night about how we think about what we're doing and the value of it."
"We won't have a fixed block time because of all this. And this is motivated by traditional markets, right? So Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange and all these big exchanges, they don't move at a fixed time. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Events come in bursts, right?"
"In fact, they can provide zero fees to their users and front all the costs for like by, you know, just say, I'll put the price in the block and I'll forward it on to the validator set for you. And so it's actually really powerful when you want to have like kind of either zero fee or very low fee transactions. It opens up a whole bunch of use cases."
"You could imagine like a DEX coming in, they capture all of their flows and they can actually build blocks for their users and actually build the best possible blocks. They can kind of push out all the sandwiching and capture all of those flows themselves, provide really low fees to their users."