Part 1 of a 2-part series on how Fireblocks uses Smart Router to survive extreme network events. Stay tuned for Part 2, coming soon.
TL;DR
In January 2025, the $TRUMP token launch pushed Solana to one of the most congested moments in its history. Fireblocks saw a 1,000% spike in Solana traffic from institutional clients executing time-sensitive trades. RPC providers across the ecosystem buckled. Smart Router by Magma Devs rerouted around the congestion automatically and held Fireblocks at 100% uptime and 100% first-attempt transaction success, with transaction broadcast times cut from 1.5 seconds to 47 milliseconds.
The event: Solana at its limit
Between January 17–19, 2025, the launch of the official $TRUMP memecoin triggered one of the largest traffic spikes in Solana's history. Overall network activity rose roughly 5×. In under 48 hours, decentralized exchanges processed $25 billion in trading volume, about 74% of all DEX volume across every blockchain at peak.
RPC infrastructure across the ecosystem was pushed well past its limits. Latency jumped from milliseconds to seconds, transaction broadcasting became unreliable, and some users waited hours for transactions to confirm. For a retail trader, that is frustrating. For an institution moving size on a time-sensitive trade, it is a direct financial risk.
Fireblocks at the center of the surge
Fireblocks is one of the largest RPC consumers in the industry, connecting more than 2,000 institutional clients to 100+ blockchain networks. During the launch, it experienced a 1,000% increase in Solana traffic as clients raced to execute trades.
At that load, RPC providers became congested one after another. Manual failover, an engineer noticing a degraded provider and switching traffic by hand, would have been far too slow to keep pace with how quickly conditions were changing. Fireblocks needed the switching to happen on its own, in real time.
How Smart Router held
Smart Router sits between Fireblocks' applications and its RPC providers, monitoring provider health and latency continuously. When the $TRUMP surge hit, it responded automatically:
It routed traffic away from congested providers the moment they degraded, and spread requests across multiple healthy upstreams to avoid concentrating load on any single one. It broadcast transactions to several providers simultaneously so the fastest confirmation won, keeping transactions flowing even as individual providers slowed. And its built-in, block-aware cache absorbed redundant reads, relieving pressure on already-strained infrastructure.
All of it happened without manual intervention from Fireblocks' engineers.
Before and after Smart Router
| During the $TRUMP launch | Without Smart Router | With Smart Router |
|---|---|---|
| Response to provider congestion | Manual failover, too slow to keep up | Automatic, real-time rerouting |
| Uptime at 10× standard traffic | Service at risk as providers congest | 100% uptime |
| First-attempt transaction success | Delays, with some transactions waiting hours | 100% first-attempt success |
| Transaction broadcast time | ~1.5 seconds | 47 milliseconds |
| Response times under load | Latency spiking from milliseconds to seconds | 30% faster |
| Load on strained providers | Full weight of redundant calls | Cut via built-in caching |
| Engineer intervention | Hands-on firefighting during peak | None required |
Why this was a turning point
The $TRUMP launch was not just a good result for Fireblocks. It was the moment Magma Devs realized Smart Router was a category of its own.
"That was the moment we realized it's a new category. Every serious team is quietly building the same thing in the back end, patch on patch, and none of them knows a product can take the nightmare away."
Yair Cleper
Co-Founder, Magma Devs
Fireblocks was already running the open-source core that Smart Router is built on. After watching the routing layer hold through the launch while providers failed around it, they asked Magma Devs to turn that core into a product they could run in production.
Why it matters
For institutional clients, a viral launch is exactly the wrong moment for infrastructure to wobble. They rely on Fireblocks to execute transactions worth billions of dollars, and degraded performance at a peak market moment hits their financial outcomes directly. A single failure doesn't just risk one incident; it risks long-term trust, and lost trust quickly becomes lost business.
Smart Router is a critical part of the reliability layer that lets Fireblocks uphold its service guarantees even when the underlying blockchain infrastructure does not.
Next in this series: a routine protocol upgrade takes half of Fireblocks' Ethereum providers offline at once. Stay tuned for Part 2.
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