Frequently Asked Questions¶
Docs-site note (2026-06-25): Short, grounded answers to the questions people ask first; each links to a fuller page.
Is Vexor a fork of Agave?¶
No. Vexor is an independent, clean-room implementation written from scratch in Zig — not a fork of Agave and not a thin binding around someone else's engine. It reproduces the canonical bank hash by independent code, not by inheriting the reference client's source.
This independence is the point: a fork inherits the upstream implementation and therefore shares its bug class, while a genuinely separate implementation fails in different ways — which is what real client diversity means. See How Vexor is different.
Is Vexor production-ready?¶
Not yet — it runs live on testnet today, and mainnet is the goal. Being honest about the state:
- Live on testnet, voting current and bank-exact under load — DONE.
- Empty-block production proven and cluster-accepted — DONE.
- Tx-bearing block production (the full transaction-inclusion gate) is gated and in development — not yet a shipped feature.
- Mainnet is the destination, not today's reality. Vexor is not a mainnet client yet.
We treat every decision as if real value is at stake, but you should read Vexor as a serious testnet validator working toward mainnet — not as a drop-in mainnet client. See Project Status and the Roadmap.
How is Vexor different from Sig, the other Zig client?¶
Both Vexor and Sig (Syndica) are written in Zig, so "a Zig validator" is not the distinction. The real differences are storage and focus:
| Sig (Syndica) | Vexor | |
|---|---|---|
| Language | Zig | Zig |
| Blockstore | rocksdb-zig binding (RocksDB underneath, via a Zig binding) |
VexLedger — its own 100% Zig append-segment store, no RocksDB |
| Focus / history | Began RPC / read / gossip / AccountsDB-focused; actively maturing toward full consensus | Consensus/voting-first; bank-exact and producing blocks on testnet |
To be precise: Sig is not "read-only" — it is maturing toward full consensus. The accurate distinction is storage and focus, not a capability ceiling. The standout for Vexor is that its blockstore is genuinely its own (see VexLedger). Full comparison: How Vexor is different.
Does Vexor really match Agave byte-for-byte?¶
Yes — at the consensus and interop boundaries, validated byte-for-byte against the Agave reference implementation, currently anchored to the newest testnet release (v4.2.0-beta.0 — we re-anchor this to each new release as it ships). That means every consensus-relevant byte matches exactly: the bank hash, vote state, accounts lt-hash, sysvars, the sBPF execution result, and the blockstore wire formats. We treat any divergence as a bug, gate every change against it, and cross-check against Firedancer.
This is a claim about the interop surface, not a claim that every internal byte of the binary is identical to Agave — Vexor is a separate implementation with its own internals (for example, VexLedger's on-disk layout is its own append-segment format, not a RocksDB database). The guarantee is behavioral and at the wire boundary. See the Parity & Fidelity Audit.
Why Zig?¶
Short version: Zig gives a single, small, auditable toolchain with explicit control over memory layout and scheduling, and no large C++/Rust runtime at the core — a good fit for a clean-room consensus client where every byte matters. The full rationale is in Why Zig.
Can I run it?¶
Vexor runs on a single Linux box. There is a reference hardware profile and a build/deploy path documented in Operating a Validator → Hardware. Note the production-readiness caveat above: today this means running a testnet validator.
What's the license? Is it open source?¶
Vexor is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 — the same license as Agave, Firedancer, and Sig, the
projects it uses as reference implementations. See Attribution & License
for the full reference-credit story, or the project's LICENSE file for the canonical text. The generic storage
core (zseglog) is additionally specified for extraction as its own standalone open-source Zig package.
What is a validator, anyway?¶
If you're new to Solana validators, start with the primer: What is a Validator?. It covers slots, blocks, shreds, the bank hash, voting/consensus, leader rotation, snapshots, and the gossip/Turbine/Repair protocols.