Programming Model

Close Account

The process of reclaiming an account's lamports and marking it for deletion. To close an account: transfer all lamports to a recipient, zero out the data, and (in Anchor) set the discriminator to a closed sentinel. The runtime garbage-collects zero-lamport accounts. Failing to zero data enables revival attacks.

IDclose-account

Plain meaning

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The process of reclaiming an account's lamports and marking it for deletion. To close an account: transfer all lamports to a recipient, zero out the data, and (in Anchor) set the discriminator to a closed sentinel. The runtime garbage-collects zero-lamport accounts. Failing to zero data enables revival attacks.

Mental model

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Think of it as one of the core moving pieces your program reads, writes, or invokes at runtime.

Technical context

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Accounts, instructions, PDAs, transactions, and execution flow.

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Close Account (close-account)
Category: Programming Model
Definition: The process of reclaiming an account's lamports and marking it for deletion. To close an account: transfer all lamports to a recipient, zero out the data, and (in Anchor) set the discriminator to a closed sentinel. The runtime garbage-collects zero-lamport accounts. Failing to zero data enables revival attacks.
Related: Rent, Lamport, Account
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Concept graph

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Branch

Rent

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.

Branch

Lamport

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.

Branch

Account

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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Programming Model

Rent

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.

Programming Model

Lamport

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.

Programming Model

Account

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.

Programming Model

Compute Budget

The maximum compute units a transaction can consume. Default is 200,000 CU per instruction (max 1.4M CU per transaction). Programs can request specific limits via the ComputeBudgetProgram's SetComputeUnitLimit instruction. Under-requesting CU risks transaction failure; over-requesting wastes priority fee budget.

Commonly confused with

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Programming Modelcreate-account

Create Account

A System Program instruction that creates a new account with specified space and owner, funding it with enough lamports for rent exemption. Parameters: from (fee payer), to (new account keypair), lamports, space (bytes), and owner (program ID). The new account's data is zero-initialized.

Programming Modelaccount

Account

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.

Programming Modelaccount-data

Account Data

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.

Related terms

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Programming Modelrent

Rent

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.

Programming Modellamport

Lamport

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.

Programming Modelaccount

Account

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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Programming Model

Account

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.

Programming Model

Program

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).

Programming Model

Instruction

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.

Programming Model

Transaction

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.