Jump sues former Firedancer Solana client engineer

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Yesterday, Liam Heeger announced that he had departed Jump Crypto, where he was working on Solana’s Firedancer client, to found a company named Unto Labs that will build a high-performance layer-1 blockchain. Jump wasn’t happy with this news.

The firm filed a lawsuit against Heeger on Tuesday alleging that the former employee had violated a non-compete agreement by founding Unto. According to the lawsuit, Heeger, who was a lead software engineer for Firedancer, broke his non-compete partly by raising venture capital funds for Unto at the Solana Breakpoint conference while he was still employed by Jump.

Unto is building a “next generation layer-1 blockchain,” Heeger wrote on X. The post thread also notes Unto will not be built to run Solana like Firedancer but will be “re-imagining” blockchain architecture. The company is hiring two engineers, according to its job board. 

“Liam and Unto strongly deny [Jump’s] allegations and are confident in the integrity of our business practices,” a spokesperson for Unto said in an emailed statement. 

The Solana Foundation contracted Jump to write a high-performance Solana client from scratch in 2022. Heeger, who goes by CantalopePeel on GitHub and X, joined Jump to work on Firedancer in early 2023. As part of joining the company, he signed a non-compete agreement and agreed not to use Jump’s proprietary information to benefit anyone other than Jump, the suit says.

In September 2024, Jump sent Heeger — along with its head of R&D Kevin Bowers — to the Solana Breakpoint conference to give an update on Firedancer’s progress. Jump announced that Firedancer was live in non-voting mode, and a limited version of the client called Frankendancer was fully live. 

Jump now alleges that Heeger wasn’t just at Breakpoint to speak about Firedancer — he was also meeting with VCs to raise funds for a new blockchain. According to the suit, Heeger ultimately raised $3 million at a $50 million valuation for Unto, and his investors included the crypto-native VC firm Framework Ventures. Framework did not return a request for comment.

After Breakpoint, the suit says Heeger’s colleagues noticed he was texting more than normal, he took a private call in a conference room, and he seemed stressed and distracted from work. He then resigned from Jump in November, saying that he was not enjoying his work anymore. Jump says it was concerned about the “cryptic” reasoning for leaving the company, and it performed a wellness check on Heeger.  

The suit says that a month later, Heeger told an ex-colleague he was founding Unto. He also allegedly told a former Jump supervisor that because he had moved from Illinois to California after leaving Jump, he no longer had to comply with his non-compete agreement. 

In Jump’s view, by launching a high-performance blockchain, Heeger is now competing with Firedancer — and in doing so, he must be using proprietary information he gained while at Jump.

The lawsuit illustrates a tension between the ethos of the open-source crypto world and the reality of doing business with institutions. Solana fans will undoubtedly be disappointed to see a Firedancer-related lawsuit before a full version of the client.

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