The crypto world saw a seismic shift two weeks ago when President Trump and Melania Trump launched their meme coins on Solana. In the days that followed, Solana experienced an unprecedented surge in transaction volume, and 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. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong acknowledged the unexpected surge, posting on X that their team was working hard on scaling our Solana infrastructure to address the backlog which saw users experiencing hours-long delays. Rather than buckle under the weight, the Fireblocks engineering team went into overdrive, executing massive technical improvements in a matter of days – not months. 

Breaking Down the Numbers: How We Optimized Solana Performance

Our Blockchain and Wallet teams worked around the clock to ensure a seamless experience for our clients. Here’s a deep dive into the key optimizations:

Rebuilt our Nodes Infrastructure

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

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

• Overhauled our durable nonce mechanism 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 50%, 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%, 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 and increasing the likelihood of transactions being committed for the next produced block.
• Introduced custom fee structures, 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? Continued Innovation on Solana

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

• Introducing 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, significantly reducing costs when working with multiple token accounts.

Fireblocks: Future-Proofing Digital Asset Security and Efficiency

This moment underscores why Fireblocks remains a trusted leader in digital asset security and infrastructure. When the network came under pressure, we didn’t just hold the line—we pushed forward, making our platform stronger, faster, and more efficient for our customers.

Huge kudos to the Wallet and Blockchain teams who worked day and night to make this happen. Your dedication ensures Fireblocks continues to set the gold standard for institutional crypto infrastructure.

We also thank the Solana foundation for their cooperation and support.

Stay tuned for even more updates as we keep innovating. If you have questions about how these improvements benefit your business, reach out to your account team or request a demo today.