We’ve had two months to digest the seismic shock that President Donald Trump delivered to crypto markets before his inauguration.
Among all the feelings and unforgettable memories, one thing is abundantly certain: Firedancer is the real deal, and its full rollout will mark a transformational new era for Solana.
Before we dive into our biggest takeaways from operating the best-performing validator (powered by Frankendancer) that supported Solana during the Trump activity tsunami, let’s quickly recap the events that took place.
The memecoin heard ‘round the world
On January 18, Trump launched the $TRUMP meme coin through two entities, CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC. CIC Digital LLC was previously associated with Trump’s NFT Cards, and Fight Fight Fight LLC is a newly established entity used for this token launch.
Two days later, on January 20 (1 AM GMT+1), Melania Trump followed with $MELANIA using the entity MKT World LLC, which she established in 2021. Investors rushed in, pushing $TRUMP’s fully diluted market cap up to $73bn and $MELANIA’s to $13bn within 48 hours after launch.
Two parties benefited from the launch in particular: the launch teams and the Solana blockchain.
The two companies associated with Trump, CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC, hold at least 80% of the total supply. Despite the token’s considerable fall from all-time highs, the Trump stash is now valued at ~$13bn. MKT World LLC, associated with Melania Trump, holds 350m tokens (35% of total supply) valued at $429m for Melania (as of Feb 19th, 2025). The Trump team (and Melania team likely as well) earn fees for supplying assets to trading pools. The two entities associated with Trump, CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC, provided the majority of liquidity for TRUMP token trading pools on Meteora. According to an interview with Tarun Chitra, co-founder and CEO of Gauntlet, the two entities generated at least $11.4m in fees since the token launch.
The second winner was Solana. The TRUMP launch brought 600k new wallets to Solana (12% of daily active wallets), bringing a surge of usage to the blockchain from users and bots spamming the network to land transactions. The volume traded on Solana’s decentralized exchanges spiked to $36bn on the 18th of January, outshining Ethereum (which traded $11.1bn through decentralized exchanges on 11 March 2023), the previous record holder, by 3.2x.
Our Frankendancer-powered validator led the response
Since neither TRUMP nor MELANIA tokens were listed on any centralized exchanges, the 600k users had to interact with the Solana blockchain and buy the tokens from decentralized exchanges directly.
Solana quickly faced overload.
This was seen on Phantom wallet, which had a peak surge of 8m transaction requests per minute (over 130k per second). Median priority fees on Solana jumped 5000x at one point.
“Such a load would have broken Solana just two years ago, but Solana has evolved significantly since then, and the correct functioning of priority fees prevented the chain from halting.”
The RockawayX validator is one of the few that has been running the Frankendancer client live on mainnet since around mid-December 2024. Frankendancer integrates some features from Firedancer (the final form of a speed and latency-optimized Solana client) into Agave (the current client developed by Anza) to create a better and faster version of the current client.
To become one of the best-performing validators running the most up-to-date client is not enough. RockawayX builds, operates, and configures its own infrastructure stack. We run custom bare metal server configurations with the latest generation hardware (Epyc Zen4, DDR5, NVMe5). We also have a custom network optimized for speed and latency. Our validator is directly connected through a 20 Gbps connection to the Tier 1 internet service provider (backbone of the internet, direct peering with 1797523964 addresses). In other words, there is no middleman between our validator and the internet that could slow our connection down.
“During the TRUMP and MELANIA activity surge, we outperformed all other Solana network validators by 2x and generated more rewards for our stakers than any other validator.”
Thanks to running Frankendancer on our optimized hardware with best-in-class connection, RockawayX’s validator had enough resources to build larger blocks that could fit more transactions when it became the leader for the slot.
Graph: validator rewards per epoch; RockawayX Firedancer server is called “The Gods Themselves”
RockawayX solvers also performed exceptionally well
Our solvers’ products performed exceptionally well, thanks to our deep Solana expertise and fast response.
As of January, we were running 3 solver products for 3 different cross-chain protocols – Mayan, Debridge, and Wormhole. All these protocols were used by users to bridge assets into Solana blockchain to be able to purchase TRUMP and MELANIA tokens.
The TRUMP token launch stretched the Mayan protocol to its limits.
During normal days, the Mayan protocol transfers around $10m in value daily between the connected blockchains, and RockawayX solvers fulfill around $5m of this volume. During the TRUMP token launch, the transfer volumes spiked to $59m. RockawayX transferred around $24m (~41% of total volumes on that day).
Priority fees tied to the token launch spiked by 50x, making it even harder to land transactions on Solana. Despite the spike in priority fees, our solver was able to fulfill 93% of the orders won in the Mayan auction process. The RockawayX Labs team worked tirelessly during the weekend of January 18th to ensure smooth operation and seamless user experience for users bridging to Solana from other chains.
To level up your Solana experience, stake with the official RockawayX Firedancer validator and join the acceleration revolution:
https://solanabeach.io/validator/RNXpSdqrJL6eoLrbW69Q9qsFviEwRpfFfk3HiRRRohq
Disclaimer:
The value of digital asset investments may fall as well as rise, and you may get back less than you originally invested. It is therefore important that you understand the risks involved before investing. This report represents RockawayX’s view at a point in time, and information included has been sourced from third parties, such as companies in RockawayX-managed portfolios. While these sources are considered reliable, RockawayX has not independently verified this information and makes no warranties regarding its current accuracy or suitability for specific situations. We may also take the opposite view/position from that stated in this report. This is because our view may change as facts or circumstances change.
This material constitutes general advice only and not personal financial product, tax, legal, or investment advice, and does not take into account the specific investment objectives, financial situation or individual needs of any particular person. We recommend consulting with your own professional advisers on these topics. Any mention of securities or digital assets is for illustration only and does not imply a recommendation or constitute an offer of investment advisory services. Furthermore, this material is not intended for use by current or prospective investors and should not be used as the basis for any investment decisions regarding funds managed by RockawayX. Any potential investment in RockawayX funds would be subject to documentation such as a private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant materials, which should be carefully reviewed in their entirety. The investments or portfolio companies mentioned may not represent all investments made by RockawayX, and past results do not assure similar outcomes in future investments.
