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Vexor

Vexor is an independent, Zig-native validator client for the Solana network: testnet-only, pre-production (version 0.9.x).

It validates blocks, votes on consensus, and produces blocks the same way Agave and Firedancer do, gated to reproduce the canonical bank hash byte-for-byte, but it is built from the ground up in Zig, as a clean-room, independently-auditable implementation. Where most of the ecosystem runs one codebase (Agave) or its direct derivatives, Vexor is a genuinely separate implementation: more client diversity, fewer shared failure modes, and a smaller, more auditable surface.

Vexor runs live on Solana testnet today: voting at ~98.7% of maximum vote credits, producing ~97%+ of its leader slots (empty blocks; transaction-bearing block production exists behind a gate and is not yet enabled, see Project Status), on a zero-copy AF_XDP datapath, with native QUIC vote submission and its own from-scratch blockstore, VexLedger.

Honest status, up front

Vexor is testnet-only and versioned 0.9.x pre-production: 1.0.0 is reserved for the production-grade milestone. It is operated by QubeStake on identity 3J2jADiEoKMaooCQbkyr9aLnjAb5ApDWfVvKgzyK2fbP. Nothing on this site should be read as a mainnet or production readiness claim.

What Vexor aims to be

  • A true independent client. Network resilience comes from diversity. A bug or exploit in one client should not be able to halt or fork the chain. Vexor exists to be a real third implementation, not a fork.
  • Byte-faithful to canonical Solana. Every consensus-relevant byte (bank hash, vote state, lt-hash, sysvars, the sBPF execution result, the blockstore wire formats) is validated byte-for-byte against canonical mainnet-beta and testnet ledger history, currently anchored to the newest testnet protocol release (v4.2.0-beta.0). We treat any divergence from the protocol as a bug and gate every change against it.
  • Zig-native, top to bottom. The runtime, the sBPF VM, the accounts database, the networking stack, the blockstore, and the leaf-level cryptography (Ed25519, BLAKE3, BN254/alt_bn128, Poseidon, the accounts lt-hash) are all Zig, with no Firedancer or other native code linked at runtime. An alternate build option can link Firedancer's ballet AVX-512 crypto libraries instead, kept as a reference configuration, but the canonical production build (-Dpure_zig) links zero Firedancer symbols.
  • Operationally honest. Open about what is proven, what is gated and dormant, and what is still on the roadmap. No "testnet-only" shortcuts; every decision is made as if real value is at stake.

The vote program: Vexor-authored, and the live executor

The vote program, the code that lands every vote instruction, is Vexor's own, from-scratch Zig implementation of the protocol's vote-program specification, and it is the sole, unconditional live executor on testnet: executing vote instructions in ~1.9–2.0 µs, about 4.7× faster than a reference implementation, verified byte-identical across 990k+ live instructions. See The Vote Program for the full story.

How Vexor is different

A one-line version (the full comparison is in How Vexor is Different):

Agave Firedancer Vexor
Language Rust C Zig
Blockstore RocksDB (LSM) custom (fd_blockstore) VexLedger (append-segment)
Lineage the reference client independent (C) independent (Zig)
Stance canonical high-performance byte-faithful + auditable + space-efficient

Ecosystem

Parts of Vexor are developed and published as standalone libraries, useful on their own and open to the same scrutiny as the validator:

  • zbpf: a standalone sBPF virtual machine in Zig, with the ELF loader, verifier, interpreter, syscalls, CPI, and native builtins. 1,065 tests across 31 build steps, public CI green.
  • zolcrypt: pure-Zig cryptography extracted from the validator, including ed25519 (strict verification by default, matching Agave), secp256k1/r1, bn254, blake3, and the LtHash accumulator.
  • vexor-zig-sdk: an exploratory SDK for writing Solana on-chain programs in Zig, with a constraint DSL, IDL generation, and SPL bindings. 200/200 host tests; the roadmap starts with a compute-unit-exact program test harness.

Start here

Note

This documentation site is modeled on the structure and feel of docs.anza.xyz, built with Material for MkDocs, and extended with the sections that make Vexor Vexor: why we built each piece the way we did, our network stack, and our performance work. It compiles to a fully static site for self-hosting (see the repo README.md).