Glossary OS

Plain meaning

Start with the shortest useful explanation before going deeper.

Solana's protocol-level mechanism for issuing new SOL to reward validators and stakers, starting at an initial annual inflation rate of 8% at genesis (Q1 2021) and decreasing by 15% of the current rate each year until reaching a long-term fixed rate of 1.5% per year. New SOL is minted each epoch proportionally to each validator's active stake and distributed as staking rewards; 50% of transaction base fees are burned, creating partial deflationary pressure. The net effective inflation rate depends on the proportion of SOL actively staked.

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

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

Clusters, nodes, MEV actors, routing, and operating environments.

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

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

Inflation (inflation)
Category: Network
Definition: Solana's protocol-level mechanism for issuing new SOL to reward validators and stakers, starting at an initial annual inflation rate of 8% at genesis (Q1 2021) and decreasing by 15% of the current rate each year until reaching a long-term fixed rate of 1.5% per year. New SOL is minted each epoch proportionally to each validator's active stake and distributed as staking rewards; 50% of transaction base fees are burned, creating partial deflationary pressure. The net effective inflation rate depends on the proportion of SOL actively staked.
Related: Staking Rewards, Validator

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

Question

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

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

Staking Rewards

SOL earned by validators and their delegators each epoch as compensation for participating in consensus and securing the network, funded by protocol inflation rather than solely transaction fees. Rewards are proportional to a validator's active stake and are credited at the end of each epoch to stake accounts automatically; the effective APY depends on the current inflation rate, the percentage of total SOL staked, and the validator's commission rate. Validators set a commission (0–100%) representing the fraction of rewards they keep before passing the remainder to delegators.

Stake Epoch

Open term

Branch

Validator

A node that participates in the Solana network by validating transactions, voting on blocks, and (when selected as leader) producing new blocks. Validators run the Agave, Firedancer, or Jito client software, require significant hardware (128+ GB RAM, high-core CPU, NVMe SSD), and earn rewards from inflation and transaction fees.

Vote Account Leader Schedule

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.

Network

Staking Rewards

SOL earned by validators and their delegators each epoch as compensation for participating in consensus and securing the network, funded by protocol inflation rather than solely transaction fees. Rewards are proportional to a validator's active stake and are credited at the end of each epoch to stake accounts automatically; the effective APY depends on the current inflation rate, the percentage of total SOL staked, and the validator's commission rate. Validators set a commission (0–100%) representing the fraction of rewards they keep before passing the remainder to delegators.

Open term

Core Protocol

Validator

A node that participates in the Solana network by validating transactions, voting on blocks, and (when selected as leader) producing new blocks. Validators run the Agave, Firedancer, or Jito client software, require significant hardware (128+ GB RAM, high-core CPU, NVMe SSD), and earn rewards from inflation and transaction fees.

Open term

Network

Inflation Rate

The annualized rate at which new SOL tokens are minted by the protocol to fund staking rewards. Solana launched with an initial inflation rate of 8% per year, which decreases by 15% of the current rate each epoch year (the 'disinflation rate'), gradually approaching the terminal inflation rate of 1.5%. As of 2025, the effective inflation rate is approximately 5.0%. The actual rate of SOL supply dilution depends on the percentage of total SOL that is actively staked.

Open term

Network

Fee Market (Local/Global)

Solana operates a local fee market rather than a global one: priority fee competition is scoped to transactions that contend for the same writable accounts, so congestion on one hot account (e.g., a popular AMM pool) does not raise fees for unrelated transactions. This account-centric model means that a highly contested token mint or DEX pool can require very high priority fees to land while other transactions proceed cheaply in parallel. The local fee market is enforced by the scheduler's per-account fee-priority ordering.

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.

Networkinflation-rate

Inflation Rate

The annualized rate at which new SOL tokens are minted by the protocol to fund staking rewards. Solana launched with an initial inflation rate of 8% per year, which decreases by 15% of the current rate each epoch year (the 'disinflation rate'), gradually approaching the terminal inflation rate of 1.5%. As of 2025, the effective inflation rate is approximately 5.0%. The actual rate of SOL supply dilution depends on the percentage of total SOL that is actively staked.

Open term

Networkterminal-inflation-rate

Terminal Inflation Rate

The long-term floor for Solana's annual SOL issuance rate, set at 1.5% per year. Once the decreasing inflation schedule reaches this target, the protocol will mint new SOL at a fixed 1.5% annual rate indefinitely to continue funding staking rewards. This terminal rate was chosen to balance validator incentives with SOL holders' desire to limit dilution. Transaction fee burns provide partial deflationary pressure against this base issuance.

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.

Networkstaking-rewards

Staking Rewards

SOL earned by validators and their delegators each epoch as compensation for participating in consensus and securing the network, funded by protocol inflation rather than solely transaction fees. Rewards are proportional to a validator's active stake and are credited at the end of each epoch to stake accounts automatically; the effective APY depends on the current inflation rate, the percentage of total SOL staked, and the validator's commission rate. Validators set a commission (0–100%) representing the fraction of rewards they keep before passing the remainder to delegators.

Open term

Core Protocolvalidator

Validator

A node that participates in the Solana network by validating transactions, voting on blocks, and (when selected as leader) producing new blocks. Validators run the Agave, Firedancer, or Jito client software, require significant hardware (128+ GB RAM, high-core CPU, NVMe SSD), and earn rewards from inflation and transaction fees.

Open term

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.

Network

Mainnet Beta

Solana's primary production cluster where real SOL and real economic activity occur; the "beta" designation reflects the network's ongoing protocol development despite being fully live since March 2020. It uses the same architecture as other clusters but with real validator stakes, live staking rewards, and permanent on-chain state. All production dApps, tokens, and NFTs exist on Mainnet Beta.

Open term

Network

Devnet

A persistent public Solana cluster intended for application development and testing, running the same software version as Mainnet Beta but with no real economic value. Devnet SOL can be freely airdropped via the CLI or faucet APIs, and the ledger may be reset periodically by Solana Labs. Developers use Devnet to test programs and integrations before deploying to Mainnet Beta.

Open term

Network

Testnet

A public Solana cluster used primarily by the Solana core team and validators to test new software releases, performance benchmarks, and network upgrades under real network conditions before they reach Mainnet Beta. Testnet SOL has no monetary value, and the ledger is reset more frequently than Devnet; it is less suitable for application development and more suited for validator operators validating their infrastructure.

Open term

Network

TPS (Transactions Per Second)

The rate at which a Solana cluster processes and commits transactions; Solana's theoretical maximum exceeds 65,000 TPS due to its parallel execution model, though real-world sustained throughput on Mainnet Beta typically ranges from 2,000–5,000 non-vote TPS under normal load. Vote transactions (used for consensus) make up a significant portion of all on-chain activity and are counted separately. High TPS is enabled by Proof of History timestamps, Sealevel parallel execution, and Gulf Stream mempool-less forwarding.

Open term