Hi everyone,
In case you missed today’s Jup Planetary Call, the Jupiter Validator and JupSOL are now part of the DAO, and I’m also joining.
First, let me quickly introduce myself to those who might not know me yet.
Who am I
I’ve been a developer for over 15 years—part of the Node.js Core Team for a few years, working with companies like Google and Bankrate. Building tools that improve developers’ lives and collaborating with people who push technology forward drive me professionally. When I entered the Solana ecosystem in 2021, I created SolDev.app, which served as a primary learning resource for most Solana developers for several years. In 2022, I founded Ironforge to tackle the RPC infrastructure challenges that Solana teams faced. And in 2023/24, I started running my validator, Watchtower, to contribute more deeply to the validator ecosystem.
I’ve known a few folks on the Jupiter team since 2021, especially Kash and Soju.
Jupiter Validator
Around December/January, Soju asked if I was interested in running the Jupiter validator. It seemed like a chance to finally collaborate professionally—something we hadn’t had the opportunity to do yet. I happily agreed and took ownership.
We’ve engineered the Jupiter validator to be a performance powerhouse with zero tolerance for downtime. Through a custom primary-backup design, we’ve orchestrated seamless zero-downtime upgrades and instant failovers that keep the network humming. The infrastructure spans two geographically distributed data centers—Frankfurt and Madrid—with full redundancy at every layer. In Madrid, we don’t rent hardware—we own it outright, giving me complete control over every component’s performance characteristics and maintenance. This isn’t just redundancy for the sake of it; it’s about ruthlessly eliminating failure points and maintaining peak performance 24/7. The result is that the Jupiter validator always stays locked in the top performance tier, processing blocks without interruption even when the network faces stress tests.
Looking Ahead
Going forward, I plan to be more active here (I promised Kash I’d become more involved!), particularly on topics related to helping the DAO be less dependent on the team, the validator, JupSOL, and any other initiatives that align with my expertise as a developer or business operator.
Request for Feedback
With that in mind, I want to get the community’s input on something I’ve been considering:
Frankendancer
One topic we’ve been exploring is supporting the network by switching one of the Jupiter nodes to run Frankendancer, while keeping the trusted Agave client as a backup.
This shift has its own set of risks and rewards, which I think merit discussion, and I would love to hear your thoughts:
The Reward
Frankendancer is a new Solana client, and by switching Jupiter to run it, we’d be at the forefront of supporting the network’s crucial effort to have multiple clients, improving Solana’s overall resilience. Additionally, Frankendancer currently orders transactions in a block very efficiently, resulting in slightly higher block rewards, which translates to better APY for JupSOL holders (since block rewards are shared with them). To set realistic expectations: this would mean a modest increase of just a few basis points, not a dramatic change.
If you wish to learn more about Frankendancer, I recommend the following videos
The Risk
Frankendancer is relatively new and not as battle-tested as Agave. There’s always a slight chance of encountering bugs that could cause brief downtime. However, it’s worth noting that Watchtower (my personal validator) and several other validators have been running Frankendancer without any issues for the past couple of months. You can see who is currently running Frankendancer here: https://www.validators.app/validators?q=0.411.20121&network=mainnet
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That’s it from my side for now. I’m genuinely looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this, and more importantly, becoming an active part of the conversation and DAO activities moving forward!
Cheers, Italo
