Solana clients

Agave

The descendant of the original validator software, now stewarded by Anza. Still the majority of the network and still what most operators run.

Firedancer

A from-scratch implementation in C, by Jump Crypto, built for throughput. The point of it is the same as Ethereum’s five clients: a second implementation that does not share a codebase and therefore does not share bugs.

Frankendancer

The hybrid that got there first — Firedancer’s networking layer in front of Agave’s runtime and consensus. It let operators take the performance work without waiting for a complete second implementation, and it is why the transition has been gradual rather than a flag day.

Jito-Solana

An Agave fork adding MEV auction and tip distribution. Widely run, but not a separate implementation — a bug in Agave is a bug in Jito-Solana, so it does not contribute to client diversity even though it appears as a distinct name in operator surveys.

An RPC node is a validator with voting turned off and the full RPC API turned on, and it is materially more expensive than a voting validator — more memory, more disk, and account indexes a validator does not build. Sizing one from validator requirements is the mistake that produces a node permanently behind the cluster; running a Solana RPC node has the numbers.

So the second implementation is a consensus and networking story rather than an RPC one. If what you care about is the endpoint your application calls, the relevant question is still which solana-core version is answering it.

Solana’s equivalent of web3_clientVersion returns two fields, and the second is the more interesting one:

curl -s https://api.mainnet-beta.solana.com \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"getVersion"}'

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","result":{"feature-set":565236538,"solana-core":"4.2.0"},"id":1}

solana-core — the version, not the implementation

Agave reports one, and so do the Firedancer variants, which build Agave components. The RPC cannot tell you which implementation is behind it, and nothing on this site pretends otherwise.

feature-set — which rules the binary knows about

An identifier for the set of protocol features the running build carries. Two nodes on one version with different feature sets are running the same code with different features compiled in, which a version string alone would hide.

If you are choosing between endpoints rather than running one, the Solana rankings measure what these actually do, and the method matrix covers which of them answer what.