Glossary OS

Plain meaning

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Client-side renderers and URL wrappers that convert Solana Actions endpoints into interactive, embeddable UI components — such as buttons, input fields, and transaction previews — that can appear inside wallets, browser extensions, and social media platforms without requiring users to navigate to a dApp. A Blink is essentially a URL prefixed with https://dial.to/?action= that signals to compatible clients to fetch and render the corresponding Action metadata, enabling one-click on-chain transactions from any webpage or feed.

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Technical context

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RPCs, validators, snapshots, indexing, and network plumbing.

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Blinks (Blockchain Links) (blinks)
Category: Infrastructure
Definition: Client-side renderers and URL wrappers that convert Solana Actions endpoints into interactive, embeddable UI components — such as buttons, input fields, and transaction previews — that can appear inside wallets, browser extensions, and social media platforms without requiring users to navigate to a dApp. A Blink is essentially a URL prefixed with https://dial.to/?action= that signals to compatible clients to fetch and render the corresponding Action metadata, enabling one-click on-chain transactions from any webpage or feed.
Aliases: Blinks
Related: Solana Actions

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Solana Actions

A protocol specification that standardizes how web servers expose signable Solana transactions and messages via HTTPS endpoints, enabling any URL to become an interactive blockchain entry point. Actions use a GET/POST handshake similar to Solana Pay Transaction Requests but are generalized beyond payments to support arbitrary on-chain operations (voting, staking, DeFi interactions), and serve as the server-side counterpart to Blinks, which render Actions as embeddable UI components.

Transaction Request (Solana Pay)

Open term

Next concepts to explore

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Infrastructure

Solana Actions

A protocol specification that standardizes how web servers expose signable Solana transactions and messages via HTTPS endpoints, enabling any URL to become an interactive blockchain entry point. Actions use a GET/POST handshake similar to Solana Pay Transaction Requests but are generalized beyond payments to support arbitrary on-chain operations (voting, staking, DeFi interactions), and serve as the server-side counterpart to Blinks, which render Actions as embeddable UI components.

Open term

Infrastructure

Clockwork

A deprecated Solana on-chain automation protocol (by Clockwork Labs, now sunset) that allowed developers to schedule and trigger smart contract instructions based on time (cron expressions) or on-chain conditions using a network of automation worker threads running alongside validators. Clockwork introduced the concept of Thread accounts that encoded trigger conditions and instruction targets directly on-chain, and while it has been discontinued, it pioneered the automation primitive model later explored by projects like Turbin3 and off-chain keeper bot architectures.

Open term

Infrastructure

Arweave

A decentralized permanent storage protocol that uses a blockchain-like structure called the blockweave and a one-time upfront payment model (no recurring fees) to store data indefinitely, backed by an endowment mechanism. In the Solana ecosystem, Arweave is the dominant off-chain storage layer for NFT metadata JSON and media files, and is used by Metaplex's Bundlr/Irys integration to upload assets cheaply in bulk before minting, with URIs of the form ar://<txid> or https://arweave.net/<txid> stored in on-chain metadata accounts.

Open term

Infrastructure

RPC (Remote Procedure Call)

The JSON-RPC 2.0 protocol interface through which clients communicate with Solana nodes to query chain state, submit transactions, and subscribe to events. Solana exposes a rich set of HTTP and WebSocket endpoints (e.g., getAccountInfo, sendTransaction) that abstract direct peer-to-peer network participation, making RPC the primary integration point for wallets, dApps, and indexers.

Open term

Related terms

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Infrastructureactions

Solana Actions

A protocol specification that standardizes how web servers expose signable Solana transactions and messages via HTTPS endpoints, enabling any URL to become an interactive blockchain entry point. Actions use a GET/POST handshake similar to Solana Pay Transaction Requests but are generalized beyond payments to support arbitrary on-chain operations (voting, staking, DeFi interactions), and serve as the server-side counterpart to Blinks, which render Actions as embeddable UI components.

Open term

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Infrastructure

RPC (Remote Procedure Call)

The JSON-RPC 2.0 protocol interface through which clients communicate with Solana nodes to query chain state, submit transactions, and subscribe to events. Solana exposes a rich set of HTTP and WebSocket endpoints (e.g., getAccountInfo, sendTransaction) that abstract direct peer-to-peer network participation, making RPC the primary integration point for wallets, dApps, and indexers.

Open term

Infrastructure

RPC Node

A Solana full node that stores ledger state and serves JSON-RPC and WebSocket requests from clients without participating in consensus or voting. RPC nodes must replay every transaction to maintain an accurate account state database, and high-throughput deployments typically run dedicated RPC nodes with large SSDs, high RAM (256 GB+), and high-bandwidth network connections to handle concurrent client load without impacting validator performance.

Open term

Infrastructure

RPC Methods

The enumerated JSON-RPC endpoints exposed by Solana nodes, covering account queries (getAccountInfo, getMultipleAccounts, getProgramAccounts), block and transaction retrieval (getBlock, getTransaction), cluster metadata (getEpochInfo, getSlot, getVersion), and transaction submission (sendTransaction, simulateTransaction). Methods accept a Commitment parameter (processed, confirmed, finalized) to control the recency-vs-safety tradeoff of returned data.

Open term

Infrastructure

getAccountInfo

An RPC method that returns the complete on-chain state of a single account identified by its base-58 public key, including its lamport balance, owner program, executable flag, rent epoch, and raw data payload encoded as base64 or base58. It is the most fundamental read primitive in Solana development and is called at the specified commitment level, with the data field being null if the account does not exist.

Open term