The fundamental data storage unit on Solana. Every piece of state is stored in an account identified by a 32-byte public key. Accounts hold a lamport balance, an owner program, a data byte array (up to 10MB), and an executable flag. Only the owning program can modify an account's data, but anyone can credit lamports to it.
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The fundamental data storage unit on Solana. Every piece of state is stored in an account identified by a 32-byte public key. Accounts hold a lamport balance, an owner program, a data byte array (up to 10MB), and an executable flag. Only the owning program can modify an account's data, but anyone can credit lamports to it.
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Think of it as the state container every Solana app reads from or writes to.
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Accounts, instructions, PDAs, transactions, and execution flow.
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Account (account) Category: Programming Model Definition: The fundamental data storage unit on Solana. Every piece of state is stored in an account identified by a 32-byte public key. Accounts hold a lamport balance, an owner program, a data byte array (up to 10MB), and an executable flag. Only the owning program can modify an account's data, but anyone can credit lamports to it. Related: Public Key (Pubkey), Lamport, Rent
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A 32-byte Ed25519 public key that serves as the unique address for accounts on Solana. Pubkeys are displayed as Base58-encoded strings (e.g., '11111111111111111111111111111111' for the System Program). Every account, program, and PDA is identified by its pubkey.
The smallest unit of SOL, named after Leslie Lamport. 1 SOL = 1,000,000,000 (10^9) lamports. All balances and transfers on Solana are denominated in lamports internally. The minimum balance for an account to be rent-exempt is calculated in lamports based on the account's data size.
A fee mechanism that charges accounts for storing data on-chain. Accounts must maintain a minimum lamport balance proportional to their data size (~6.96 SOL per MB) to be rent-exempt. Since 2022, all new accounts must be rent-exempt at creation. Accounts falling below the threshold are removed during rent collection.
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The runtime struct passed to programs for each account in an instruction: `AccountInfo { key, is_signer, is_writable, lamports, data, owner, executable, rent_epoch }`. In native programs, the entrypoint receives a slice of AccountInfos. Anchor abstracts this with typed account structs but AccountInfo is available via `to_account_info()`.
The byte array stored in an account that holds program-specific state. Data is typically serialized using Borsh and must be explicitly allocated at account creation. The maximum data size is 10MB. Programs are responsible for defining and managing their own data layout, including discriminators for type identification.
A pubkey with administrative privileges over a resource—such as the mint authority (can mint tokens), freeze authority (can freeze accounts), upgrade authority (can upgrade a program), or the signer authorized to perform operations on a PDA-controlled account. Authority is a convention, not a runtime concept.
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A 32-byte Ed25519 public key that serves as the unique address for accounts on Solana. Pubkeys are displayed as Base58-encoded strings (e.g., '11111111111111111111111111111111' for the System Program). Every account, program, and PDA is identified by its pubkey.
The smallest unit of SOL, named after Leslie Lamport. 1 SOL = 1,000,000,000 (10^9) lamports. All balances and transfers on Solana are denominated in lamports internally. The minimum balance for an account to be rent-exempt is calculated in lamports based on the account's data size.
A fee mechanism that charges accounts for storing data on-chain. Accounts must maintain a minimum lamport balance proportional to their data size (~6.96 SOL per MB) to be rent-exempt. Since 2022, all new accounts must be rent-exempt at creation. Accounts falling below the threshold are removed during rent collection.
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Executable code deployed on-chain, equivalent to a smart contract on other blockchains. Programs are stateless—they store no data themselves but read/write data in separate accounts they own. Programs are compiled to SBF bytecode and loaded via the BPF Loader. Every program has a unique Program ID (its account's public key).
A single operation within a transaction that invokes a program. An instruction specifies: (1) the program ID to call, (2) an array of account metas (pubkey, is_signer, is_writable), and (3) an opaque data byte array. Programs decode the instruction data to determine which operation to perform.
An atomic unit of execution containing one or more instructions, a recent blockhash, and one or more signatures. All instructions in a transaction execute sequentially and atomically—if any instruction fails, the entire transaction reverts. Transactions have a 1,232-byte size limit (matching IPv6 MTU) and a default 200,000 CU budget.
A transaction format introduced with v0 that supports address lookup tables. Legacy transactions include all pubkeys inline (limited to ~35 accounts); v0 transactions reference ALTs to include up to 256 accounts while staying within the 1,232-byte limit. The version byte (0) precedes the message.