Glossary OS

Plain meaning

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The UDP-based transport protocol adopted by Solana as its primary transaction submission protocol, replacing raw UDP to provide congestion control, multiplexed streams, and connection-level flow control without TCP's head-of-line blocking. Solana's TPU (Transaction Processing Unit) accepts client transactions over QUIC, allowing the leader to apply back-pressure and drop connections from misbehaving senders. QUIC integration with SWQoS allows leaders to enforce stake-weighted bandwidth limits at the transport layer.

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QUIC Protocol (quic)
Category: Network
Definition: The UDP-based transport protocol adopted by Solana as its primary transaction submission protocol, replacing raw UDP to provide congestion control, multiplexed streams, and connection-level flow control without TCP's head-of-line blocking. Solana's TPU (Transaction Processing Unit) accepts client transactions over QUIC, allowing the leader to apply back-pressure and drop connections from misbehaving senders. QUIC integration with SWQoS allows leaders to enforce stake-weighted bandwidth limits at the transport layer.
Aliases: QUIC
Related: TPU (Transaction Processing Unit), Stake-Weighted QoS (SWQoS)

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Branch

TPU (Transaction Processing Unit)

Transaction Processing Unit—the pipeline within a leader validator that ingests, verifies, and executes transactions. The TPU has stages: fetch (receive packets via QUIC), sigverify (verify Ed25519 signatures), banking (execute against current bank state), and broadcast (shred and send via Turbine). Non-leader validators forward transactions to the current leader's TPU.

TVU (Transaction Validation Unit)Transaction

Open term

Branch

Stake-Weighted QoS (SWQoS)

A Quality of Service system introduced in Solana that allocates TPU packet bandwidth to staked validators proportionally to their stake weight, preventing unstaked or lightly staked nodes from flooding leaders with transactions at the expense of stake-backed traffic. Validators that have delegated stake can forward transactions and receive preferential access to leader bandwidth, making it economically meaningful to route transactions through staked RPC or validator nodes. SWQoS is a key defense against spam and denial-of-service attacks that plagued Solana during high-traffic periods.

Stake Validator

Open term

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Core Protocol

TPU (Transaction Processing Unit)

Transaction Processing Unit—the pipeline within a leader validator that ingests, verifies, and executes transactions. The TPU has stages: fetch (receive packets via QUIC), sigverify (verify Ed25519 signatures), banking (execute against current bank state), and broadcast (shred and send via Turbine). Non-leader validators forward transactions to the current leader's TPU.

Open term

Network

Stake-Weighted QoS (SWQoS)

A Quality of Service system introduced in Solana that allocates TPU packet bandwidth to staked validators proportionally to their stake weight, preventing unstaked or lightly staked nodes from flooding leaders with transactions at the expense of stake-backed traffic. Validators that have delegated stake can forward transactions and receive preferential access to leader bandwidth, making it economically meaningful to route transactions through staked RPC or validator nodes. SWQoS is a key defense against spam and denial-of-service attacks that plagued Solana during high-traffic periods.

Open term

Network

Scheduler

The component within Solana's TPU pipeline responsible for ordering transactions from the banking stage's queues, acquiring account read/write locks, and dispatching transactions to worker threads for execution. The scheduler enforces account conflict serialization (ensuring write-locked accounts are processed by only one thread at a time) while maximizing parallelism across non-conflicting transactions. Solana has iterated on scheduler designs (including the central scheduler introduced in 2024) to improve throughput and reduce lock contention under load.

Open term

Network

Private Transaction

A transaction sent directly to the current block producer or through a private relay rather than being broadcast through public RPC nodes, reducing the window for MEV searchers to observe and exploit it before inclusion. On Solana, private transactions can be routed through Jito's Block Engine or via staked connections with direct TPU access. While no transaction is truly private on a public blockchain once confirmed, private submission minimizes the pre-inclusion observation window.

Open term

Related terms

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Core Protocoltpu

TPU (Transaction Processing Unit)

Transaction Processing Unit—the pipeline within a leader validator that ingests, verifies, and executes transactions. The TPU has stages: fetch (receive packets via QUIC), sigverify (verify Ed25519 signatures), banking (execute against current bank state), and broadcast (shred and send via Turbine). Non-leader validators forward transactions to the current leader's TPU.

Open term

Networkstake-weighted-qos

Stake-Weighted QoS (SWQoS)

A Quality of Service system introduced in Solana that allocates TPU packet bandwidth to staked validators proportionally to their stake weight, preventing unstaked or lightly staked nodes from flooding leaders with transactions at the expense of stake-backed traffic. Validators that have delegated stake can forward transactions and receive preferential access to leader bandwidth, making it economically meaningful to route transactions through staked RPC or validator nodes. SWQoS is a key defense against spam and denial-of-service attacks that plagued Solana during high-traffic periods.

Open term

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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