Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
This morning, a bombshell piece of news about personnel changes set off the Solana community.
In the early hours of the morning, Solana core developer Cantelopepeel announced that he would resign from the Solana client team Firedancer and create Unto Labs. Cantelopepeel said that Unto Labs will build a new generation of Layer1 blockchain, which will be "designed for performance without compromise."
Who is Cantelopepeel?
Cantelopepeel is better known on Github as Liam.
He has played an important role in the development and upgrade process of the Solana ecosystem. Over the past two years, Cantelopepeel has been responsible for leading the development of the highly anticipated Firedancer client of the Solana ecosystem.
At Breakpoint 2024, Cantelopepeel demonstrated the development of Firedancer, a client that can run in global private clusters, process 1 million TPS per second, 1 billion computing units per second, and use 1 Gbps of block space.
In a statement released today, Cantelopepeel described Firedancer as the highest-performing open source blockchain client currently available, an excellent foundation for building high-performance applications (whether blockchain or otherwise), and said he is proud of his contribution to it.
However, this is still not enough.
Goal: Next-generation blockchain
In Cantelopepeel's view, as the scale of users expands, real user activities on the blockchain are much more complicated than demonstrations in a test environment. Existing blockchains will have difficulties in meeting the real-world needs of users and applications, so something new needs to be built to meet real needs.
Cantelopepeel believes that in order to achieve generational improvements in performance and user experience, a completely new approach must be adopted. To this end, Cantelopepeel will use some new and untested ideas to try to build the "best Layer1".
Cantelopepeel explicitly mentioned that this is not about creating a new SVM network, but about redesigning the architecture, rebuilding the virtual machines, consensus, and everything in between, all of which serve the same purpose - providing more space for users and applications.
On the official social media homepage of Unto Labs, which is now online, there is a sentence that clearly describes Cantelopepeel's vision: "Building a global distributed system at the limits of reality."
Madman and Genius
Cantelopepeel's resignation and re-entrepreneurship has sparked widespread discussion within the Solana ecosystem.
Max Resnick, chief economist of Anza, the Solana network maintenance team, 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 on Firedancer and it was unbelievable. This guy is a lunatic! I'm excited for what he's going to build next."
Market Impact
After Cantelopepeel made his decision, the market was most concerned about two issues: first, what impact would it have on Solana? Second, whether it would be possible to participate in Unto Labs as soon as possible?
Regarding the first question, there is no need to worry too much. Although Cantelopepeel’s departure is bound to bring some twists and turns, the development of Firedancer is almost complete. Earlier this month, there was news that the Solana Foundation is stepping up testing of Firedancer. Therefore, 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 its very early stages, and Cantelopepeel himself described it as "using some new and untested ideas". There are currently no products available for trial, so interested users only need to pay attention to its dynamics. However, Cantelopepeel mentioned today that Unto Labs has started recruiting. After checking with Odaily Planet Daily, it was found that there are only two development positions, both in San Francisco. Developers who are qualified and interested may wish to give it a try.
