The "code madman" who led Solana's upgrade left his job to start a business, aiming at high-performance L1 to subvert the old world.

Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily

This morning, a piece of heavy news about personnel changes detonated the Solana community.

In the early hours of the morning, Solana core developer Cantelopepeel announced that he would leave the Solana client team Firedancer and create Unto Labs. Cantelopepeel said that Unto Labs will build a new generation of Layer 1 blockchain that will be “built for performance without compromise.”

Who is Cantelopepeel?

Cantelopepeel is better known as Liam on Github.

He has played an important role in the development and upgrade process of the Solana ecosystem. In the past two years, Cantelopepeel has been responsible for leading the development of the much-anticipated Firedancer client of the Solana ecosystem.

At Breakpoint 2024, Cantelopepeel demonstrated the development results of Firedancer. The client can run in private clusters around the world, processing 1 million TPS per second, 1 billion compute units per second, and block space usage of 1 Gbps.

In a statement released today, Cantelopepeel described Firedancer as the highest-performing open source blockchain client available, an excellent foundation for building high-performance applications (whether blockchain or otherwise), and praised what it has done for it. proud of its contribution.

However, these are still not enough.

Goal: Next-generation blockchain

In Cantelopepeel’s view, as the user scale expands, real user activities on the blockchain are much more complex than the demonstrations in the test environment. Existing blockchains have trouble meeting the real-world needs of users and applications, so something new needs to be built to meet real-world needs.

Cantelopepeel believes that achieving generational improvements in performance and user experience requires a completely new approach. To this end, Cantelopepeel will use some new and untested ideas to try to build the "best Layer 1".

Cantelopepeel clearly mentioned that this is not about creating a new SVM network, but about redesigning the architecture, rebuilding the virtual machine, consensus and everything in between, all of which serve the same purpose - for users and applications provide more space.

On the official social media homepage of Unto Labs, which is now online, there is a sentence that can clearly describe Cantelopepeel's vision: "Building a global distributed system at the limit of reality."

madman and genius

Cantelopepeel's resignation and re-starting a business sparked widespread discussion within the Solana ecosystem.

Max Resnick, chief economist of Solana network maintenance team Anza, posted on X that he is looking forward to seeing what Cantelopepeel can do.

Succinct developer Uma Roy said: "Liam once showed me the code he wrote in Firedancer, and it was unbelievable. This man is a madman! I am very excited about what he will build next. "

Impact on the market outlook

After Cantelopepeel made its decision, the market was most concerned about two issues. One was what impact would it have on Solana? Second, can I participate in Unto Labs as early as possible?

Regarding the first question, there is actually no need to worry too much. Although Cantelopepeel's departure will inevitably bring some twists and turns, the development work of Firedancer is almost completed. Earlier this month, there was news that the Solana Foundation is stepping up its efforts. News of Firedancer testing, so it is expected that Cantelopepeel's departure will not have much impact on the official launch of Firedancer.

As for the second question, Unto Labs is still in a very early stage. Cantelopepeel's own description of this is that it "will use some untested new ideas." There are currently no products available for trial, so interested users can only Just pay attention to its dynamics. However, Cantelopepeel mentioned today that Unto Labs has begun recruiting. After Odaily Planet Daily inquired, it was found that there are only two development positions, both of which are located in San Francisco. Qualified and interested developers may wish to give it a try.