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 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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Think of it as one of the core moving pieces your program reads, writes, or invokes at runtime.
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Accounts, instructions, PDAs, transactions, and execution flow.
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Authority (authority) Category: Programming Model Definition: 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. Related: Owner (Account), Signer, Multisig
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The program that has exclusive write access to an account's data and can debit its lamport balance. Every account has an owner field (a program pubkey). The System Program owns all new/wallet accounts. When a program creates a derived account, it typically assigns itself as owner to manage that account's state.
An account that has provided a valid Ed25519 signature in the current transaction. The runtime enforces the is_signer flag on instruction account metas—if an instruction declares an account as a signer, the transaction must include its signature. Missing signer checks are a common vulnerability in Solana programs.
An account controlled by multiple parties requiring M-of-N signatures to authorize actions. On Solana, multisig is implemented by programs like Squads rather than at the protocol level. Use cases: program upgrade authority (require 3-of-5 team members), treasury management, and DAO governance execution.
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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.
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 pubkey authorized to upgrade a program's bytecode via the Upgradeable BPF Loader. Only the upgrade authority can deploy new bytecode to the program data account. Setting the upgrade authority to None makes the program immutable. Multisig (e.g., Squads) is commonly used to manage upgrade authority for production programs.
Glossary entries become useful when they are connected. These links are the shortest path to adjacent ideas.
The program that has exclusive write access to an account's data and can debit its lamport balance. Every account has an owner field (a program pubkey). The System Program owns all new/wallet accounts. When a program creates a derived account, it typically assigns itself as owner to manage that account's state.
An account that has provided a valid Ed25519 signature in the current transaction. The runtime enforces the is_signer flag on instruction account metas—if an instruction declares an account as a signer, the transaction must include its signature. Missing signer checks are a common vulnerability in Solana programs.
An account controlled by multiple parties requiring M-of-N signatures to authorize actions. On Solana, multisig is implemented by programs like Squads rather than at the protocol level. Use cases: program upgrade authority (require 3-of-5 team members), treasury management, and DAO governance execution.
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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.
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.