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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.

IDrpc-node
Plain meaning

Plain meaning

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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.

Mental model

Mental model

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Technical context

Technical context

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

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RPC Node (rpc-node)
Category: Infrastructure
Definition: 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.
Related: RPC (Remote Procedure Call), Validator
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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 Methods
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 AccountStake
Open term
Next concepts to explore

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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
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
Infrastructure

sendTransaction (RPC)

The Solana RPC method that submits a fully signed, serialized transaction to the cluster for processing. The transaction is passed as a base64-encoded string. By default, the RPC node performs preflight checks (simulation) before forwarding to the leader; this can be disabled with skipPreflight for lower latency at the risk of submitting invalid transactions. The method returns the transaction signature immediately without waiting for confirmation. Clients must separately poll or subscribe for confirmation status.

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
Commonly confused with

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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.

AliasRPCAliasJSON-RPC
Open term
Infrastructurerpc-encoding

RPC Encoding

The data serialization format used to represent account data in Solana RPC responses. Supported encodings include base58 (human-readable but slow for large data), base64 (efficient binary encoding, most common), base64+zstd (compressed base64 for large accounts), and jsonParsed (structured JSON for known programs like SPL Token and System Program). The encoding parameter is specified per-request and affects response size and parse complexity on the client side.

Open term
Infrastructurerpc-methods

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
Related terms

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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
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
More in category

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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 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
Infrastructure

getProgramAccounts (GPA)

An RPC method that scans all accounts owned by a given program and returns those matching optional memcmp (memory compare) and dataSize filters, making it the standard way to discover all state accounts for a protocol (e.g., all open order books, all user positions). GPA is resource-intensive because it performs a full account-store scan on the RPC node; many public endpoints rate-limit or disable it, which is why purpose-built indexers and services like Helius are used in production to serve GPA-equivalent queries at scale.

Open term