The "code fanatic" who led the Solana upgrade has left to start a business, aiming to disrupt the old world with high-performance L1

Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily

This morning, a major personnel change ignited the Solana community.

In the early hours, Solana core developer Cantelopepeel announced his departure from the Solana client team Firedancer to create Unto Labs. Cantelopepeel stated that Unto Labs will build a new generation Layer 1 blockchain that is "designed for performance, with no compromises."

Who is Cantelopepeel?

Cantelopepeel is better known by his name on GitHub, Liam.

He has played a significant role in the development and upgrade process of the Solana ecosystem, and over the past two years, Cantelopepeel has been responsible for leading the development of the highly anticipated Firedancer client within the Solana ecosystem.

At Breakpoint 2024, Cantelopepeel showcased the development achievements of Firedancer. This client can run on global private clusters, processing 1 million TPS and 1 billion compute units per second, with block space usage reaching 1 Gbps.

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 expressed pride in his contributions to it.

However, this is still not enough.

Goal: A New Generation Blockchain

In Cantelopepeel's view, as the user base expands, real user activity on the blockchain is far more complex than demonstrations in a testing environment. Existing blockchains struggle to meet the real-world needs of users and applications, so there is a need to build something new to address these real demands.

Cantelopepeel believes that to achieve generational improvements in performance and user experience, a completely new approach must be adopted. To this end, Cantelopepeel will use some untested new ideas to attempt to build the "best Layer 1."

Cantelopepeel explicitly mentioned that this is not about creating a new SVM network, but rather about redesigning the architecture, rebuilding the virtual machine, consensus, and everything in between, all serving the same purpose—providing more space for users and applications.

On the now-launched official social media page of Unto Labs, a phrase clearly describes Cantelopepeel's vision: "Building globally distributed systems at the limits of reality."

Madman and Genius

Cantelopepeel's departure to start anew has sparked widespread discussion within the Solana ecosystem.

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

Succinct developer Uma Roy stated, "Liam once showed me the code he wrote for Firedancer, it was simply unbelievable. This guy is a madman! I'm excited about what he will build next."

Market Impact

After Cantelopepeel made his decision, the market's main concerns boiled down to two questions: what impact will this have on Solana? And can one participate in Unto Labs early?

Regarding the first question, there is no need to worry too much. Although Cantelopepeel's departure will inevitably bring some turbulence, the development work on Firedancer is already nearing completion. Earlier this month, there were reports that the Solana Foundation was accelerating the testing of Firedancer, so it is expected that Cantelopepeel's departure will not significantly affect the official launch of Firedancer.

As for the second question, Unto Labs is still in the very early stages, and Cantelopepeel himself described it as "using some untested new ideas." Currently, there are no products available for trial, so interested users should just keep an eye on their updates for now. However, Cantelopepeel mentioned today that Unto Labs has begun recruiting, and Odaily Planet Daily found that there are only two developer positions available, both located in San Francisco. Developers who are qualified and interested might as well give it a try.