The crypto world saw a seismic shift two weeks ago when President Trump and Melania Trump launched their meme coins on Solana. Almost overnight, Solana experienced an unprecedented surge in transaction volume, pushing infrastructure across the ecosystem to its limits. Fireblocks was right at the center of it.

At the peak, we saw a 1,000% increase in Solana traffic. Every company operating in the space felt the pressure—transaction delays were rampant, leaving users frustrated. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong acknowledged the situation on X, admitting that the scale of the volume was unforeseeable and their team was working tirelessly to scale their Solana infrastructure to address the resulting backlog. Yet as backlogs grew, some users were waiting hours to complete their transactions. 

At this exact time, Fireblocks’ engineering team went into overdrive, executing massive technical improvements—dramatically improving transaction throughput, slashing delays, and ultimately fortifying the system against future surges.

What started as an industry-wide bottleneck became an opportunity to push the limits of scalability. This wasn’t just a fix—it was a foundational improvement that will allow institutions to confidently scale their digital asset operations on Solana moving forward.

Here’s what’s most important: when it mattered for Solana’s unprecedented traffic surge, Fireblocks achieved breakthrough performance improvements, slashing broadcasting time from 1.5 seconds to 47 milliseconds while reaching 100% first-attempt transaction success. The platform also reduced median transaction processing time to 6 seconds and cut fees to under $0.01 per transfer.

The Ultimate Challenge: Where Pressure Breeds Scale

During the surge in Solana traffic, Fireblocks was able to dramatically improve performance under immense pressure, ultimately:

• Broadcasting time slashed to 47 milliseconds: What once took a 1.5 seconds to broadcast is now producing nearly instantaneous transaction throughput.
• 100% Transaction success on first attempt: By implementing stake-weighted Quality of Service (QoS) and ensuring priority transaction routing, we eliminated all retry attempts. 
• Under $0.01 transfer fees: Transaction costs were further minimized, with base asset transfers now costing less than a penny—enhancing efficiency for institutions conducting high volumes of transactions.
• Serialization time cut by 48%: Our overhaul of the serialization process means that we can now process data faster, contributing to the overall reduction in latency and improving throughput.
• Median transaction processing time reduced to 6 seconds: From initiation to final confirmation, the median time to process a complete transaction now stands at just 6 seconds—demonstrating a significant leap forward in transaction speed.

Breaking Down the Numbers: How We Optimized Solana Performance

Rebuilt Nodes Infrastructure

• Added multiple high-quality node providers, increasing redundancy and reliability.
• Solana nodes in-house, further increasing speed and reliability.
• New active-active routing mechanism, ensuring traffic is directed to the most efficient node with zero downtime to scale out our node infrastructure on demand.
• Stake-weighted QoS to improve transaction prioritization, we are currently able to provide 100% rate on first attempt, minimizing delays and retry attempts.
• Node response time down 30%, meaning faster confirmations and real-time feedback for our clients.

Latency Reductions and Throughput Improvements for Faster Transactions, Smoother User Experience

• Latency is down to 300 milliseconds to support customers requiring more flexible signing times. As part of this effort, we reduced allocation mechanism latency by 90% and increased the available nonce pool by 4x.
• Cut serialization time by 48% — down to 377 milliseconds — allowing transactions to be processed faster.
• Boosted transaction broadcasting throughput by 10x, allowing us to handle increased volumes without congestion.
• Decreased broadcasting latency by 97%, ensuring transactions hit the blockchain with near-zero delay.
• Improved error identification, we improved our error identification providing faster visibility to our users on when a transaction will not be able to succeed.
• Improved transaction notification time by 70% and down to 20 seconds, ensuring users are alerted to incoming and outgoing transactions faster than ever.

Solana Infrastructure Stability: Building Resilience for the Future

• Improved our dynamic fee calculation system, reducing transaction costs to less than a cent and increasing the likelihood of transactions being committed for the next produced block.
• New fee level support, giving customers flexibility in prioritizing transaction speed and cost.
• Reduced errors by incorporating idempotent instructions, preventing race conditions and improving parallel processing.

What’s Next? Our Continued Innovation on Solana

Our work isn’t done. The next phase of our Solana optimizations includes giving users more control over costs.

• New advanced program call support, allowing for more advanced interactions with Solana programs.
• Enabling multi-destination transfers, improving withdrawal and payment operations.
• Enhancing associated token account interactions for smoother transaction processing.
• Adding Solana Fee Payer support, streamlining transaction management and significantly reducing costs when working with multiple token accounts.

The Industry’s Leader in Security, Speed, and Scale 

This transformation comes at a pivotal moment for the industry. As regulations gain clarity and stablecoin adoption accelerates enterprises are no longer exploring blockchain as a side experiment—it’s becoming a core part of their financial infrastructure. To scale securely, they need battle-tested solutions that provide speed, security, and operational resilience.

Fireblocks has been at the forefront of this shift, securing and enabling the seamless movement of trillions of dollars in digital assets. Our infrastructure ensures institutions can operate with confidence, leveraging next-generation security and real-time transaction capabilities to drive the future of finance.

Huge kudos to the Fireblocks engineering teams who worked day and night to make this happen, and to Solana foundation for their cooperation and support.Stay tuned for even more updates as we keep innovating. We continue to invest in future-proofing the Fireblocks platform to support our 2000+ customers’ scale and speed. Join us and request a demo today.