OGGlossary OSSolana vocabulary rebuilt for builders.
ENPT-BRES
Infrastructure

Solana Explorer

Web-based blockchain browsers that index and visualize Solana ledger data including transactions, accounts, blocks, validators, and token metadata in human-readable form. Explorer.solana.com is the official Solana Labs explorer; Solscan (solscan.io) is the most popular community explorer offering DeFi analytics and token holder data; SolanaFM (solana.fm) provides enhanced transaction decoding, program labeling, and cross-program invocation graphs — all connect to RPC nodes and indexers to serve their data.

IDexplorerAliasSolscanAliasSolanaFM
Plain meaning

Plain meaning

Start with the shortest useful explanation before going deeper.

Web-based blockchain browsers that index and visualize Solana ledger data including transactions, accounts, blocks, validators, and token metadata in human-readable form. Explorer.solana.com is the official Solana Labs explorer; Solscan (solscan.io) is the most popular community explorer offering DeFi analytics and token holder data; SolanaFM (solana.fm) provides enhanced transaction decoding, program labeling, and cross-program invocation graphs — all connect to RPC nodes and indexers to serve their data.

Mental model

Mental model

Use the quick analogy first so the term is easier to reason about when you meet it in code, docs, or prompts.

Think of it as a building block that connects one definition to the larger Solana system around it.

Technical context

Technical context

Place the term inside its Solana layer so the definition is easier to reason about.

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

Why builders care

Why builders care

Turn the term from vocabulary into something operational for product and engineering work.

This term unlocks adjacent concepts quickly, so it works best when you treat it as a junction instead of an isolated definition.

AI handoff

AI handoff

Use this compact block when you want to give an agent or assistant grounded context without dumping the entire page.

Solana Explorer (explorer)
Category: Infrastructure
Definition: Web-based blockchain browsers that index and visualize Solana ledger data including transactions, accounts, blocks, validators, and token metadata in human-readable form. Explorer.solana.com is the official Solana Labs explorer; Solscan (solscan.io) is the most popular community explorer offering DeFi analytics and token holder data; SolanaFM (solana.fm) provides enhanced transaction decoding, program labeling, and cross-program invocation graphs — all connect to RPC nodes and indexers to serve their data.
Aliases: Solscan, SolanaFM
Related: Transaction, RPC (Remote Procedure Call)
Glossary Copilot

Ask grounded Solana questions without leaving the glossary.

Use glossary context, relationships, mental models, and builder paths to get structured answers instead of generic chat output.

Open full Copilot workspace
Explain this code

Optional: paste Anchor, Solana, or Rust code so the Copilot can map primitives back to glossary terms.

Ask a glossary-grounded question

Ask a glossary-grounded question

The Copilot will answer using the current term, related concepts, mental models, and the surrounding glossary graph.

Concept graph

See the term as part of a network, not a dead-end definition.

These branches show which concepts this term touches directly and what sits one layer beyond them.

Branch

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.

InstructionSignature
Open term
Branch

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.

RPC NodeRPC Methods
Open term
Next concepts to explore

Keep the learning chain moving instead of stopping at one definition.

These are the next concepts worth opening if you want this term to make more sense inside a real Solana workflow.

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.

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
Infrastructure

Solana Mobile

A hardware and software initiative by Solana Labs producing Android smartphones (Saga, Chapter 2) with a secure element-backed seed vault for private key storage, a curated dApp store for Solana applications, and the Mobile Wallet Adapter protocol for standardized wallet-dApp communication on mobile. The Solana Mobile Stack (SMS) enables native mobile dApps to interact with on-device wallets without browser extensions or QR code scanning, targeting the mobile-first crypto user base.

Open term
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
Commonly confused with

Terms nearby in vocabulary, acronym, or conceptual neighborhood.

These entries are easy to mix up when you are reading quickly, prompting an LLM, or onboarding into a new layer of Solana.

Infrastructuresolana-mobile

Solana Mobile

A hardware and software initiative by Solana Labs producing Android smartphones (Saga, Chapter 2) with a secure element-backed seed vault for private key storage, a curated dApp store for Solana applications, and the Mobile Wallet Adapter protocol for standardized wallet-dApp communication on mobile. The Solana Mobile Stack (SMS) enables native mobile dApps to interact with on-device wallets without browser extensions or QR code scanning, targeting the mobile-first crypto user base.

AliasSMSAliasSaga
Open term
Infrastructuresolana-pay

Solana Pay

An open payment standard and SDK that defines URI schemes and protocol flows for requesting SOL or SPL token transfers and for constructing and returning partially-built transactions from merchant backends to user wallets. It comprises two sub-protocols — Transfer Requests (simple static payment URIs) and Transaction Requests (dynamic server-signed transaction fetching) — and enables point-of-sale payments, loyalty programs, and interactive commerce experiences using QR codes or deeplinks.

Open term
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.

AliasActions
Open term
Related terms

Follow the concepts that give this term its actual context.

Glossary entries become useful when they are connected. These links are the shortest path to adjacent ideas.

Programming Modeltransaction

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.

Open term
Infrastructurerpc

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
More in category

Stay in the same layer and keep building context.

These entries live beside the current term and help the page feel like part of a larger knowledge graph instead of a dead end.

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