Programming Model

Transaction Mortality

The limited lifespan of a Solana transaction determined by its referenced blockhash. A transaction's blockhash must correspond to a block within the last 150 slots (~60-90 seconds) or the transaction is rejected as expired. This mechanism prevents replay attacks and bounds the time validators must track transaction deduplication. Durable nonces bypass mortality for use cases requiring long-lived transactions.

IDtransaction-mortality

Plain meaning

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The limited lifespan of a Solana transaction determined by its referenced blockhash. A transaction's blockhash must correspond to a block within the last 150 slots (~60-90 seconds) or the transaction is rejected as expired. This mechanism prevents replay attacks and bounds the time validators must track transaction deduplication. Durable nonces bypass mortality for use cases requiring long-lived transactions.

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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Transaction Mortality (transaction-mortality)
Category: Programming Model
Definition: The limited lifespan of a Solana transaction determined by its referenced blockhash. A transaction's blockhash must correspond to a block within the last 150 slots (~60-90 seconds) or the transaction is rejected as expired. This mechanism prevents replay attacks and bounds the time validators must track transaction deduplication. Durable nonces bypass mortality for use cases requiring long-lived transactions.
Related: Blockhash (Recent), Durable Nonce, Transaction
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Concept graph

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

Branch

Blockhash (Recent)

A 32-byte hash derived from the bank's state at a given slot, included in every Solana transaction to prove the transaction was created recently and to prevent replay attacks. A blockhash remains valid for approximately 150 slots (~60–90 seconds at normal slot times); transactions submitted with an expired blockhash are rejected outright. Clients must fetch a fresh blockhash before signing and ideally reuse it for as short a window as possible to maximize landing probability.

Branch

Durable Nonce

A mechanism that replaces the short-lived recent blockhash in a transaction with a nonce value stored in a dedicated on-chain nonce account, allowing the transaction to remain valid indefinitely until it is used or the nonce is advanced. The nonce account stores the current nonce hash and an authority; the first instruction of any durable-nonce transaction must be AdvanceNonceAccount, which updates the nonce and invalidates the old one. Durable nonces are essential for workflows requiring offline signing, hardware security modules, or multi-party approval over extended time periods.

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.

Next concepts to explore

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Network

Blockhash (Recent)

A 32-byte hash derived from the bank's state at a given slot, included in every Solana transaction to prove the transaction was created recently and to prevent replay attacks. A blockhash remains valid for approximately 150 slots (~60–90 seconds at normal slot times); transactions submitted with an expired blockhash are rejected outright. Clients must fetch a fresh blockhash before signing and ideally reuse it for as short a window as possible to maximize landing probability.

Network

Durable Nonce

A mechanism that replaces the short-lived recent blockhash in a transaction with a nonce value stored in a dedicated on-chain nonce account, allowing the transaction to remain valid indefinitely until it is used or the nonce is advanced. The nonce account stores the current nonce hash and an authority; the first instruction of any durable-nonce transaction must be AdvanceNonceAccount, which updates the nonce and invalidates the old one. Durable nonces are essential for workflows requiring offline signing, hardware security modules, or multi-party approval over extended time periods.

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.

Programming Model

Transaction Simulation

The broader developer workflow of dry-running a Solana transaction before broadcast to inspect logs, catch runtime failures, estimate compute usage, and verify account assumptions. Transaction simulation can happen through the simulateTransaction RPC method, preflight checks inside sendTransaction, or specialized bundle and bot pipelines that repeatedly simulate against fresh state before deciding to submit.

Commonly confused with

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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.

AliasTX
Programming Modeltransaction-id

Transaction ID

The first signature in a transaction, which uniquely identifies it on the network. Since each transaction has a unique combination of signers and a recent blockhash, the first signer's Ed25519 signature over the transaction message serves as a globally unique identifier. Transaction IDs are displayed as Base58-encoded 64-byte strings and used for lookups via getTransaction and getSignatureStatuses.

AliasTXID
Programming Modeltransaction-simulation

Transaction Simulation

The broader developer workflow of dry-running a Solana transaction before broadcast to inspect logs, catch runtime failures, estimate compute usage, and verify account assumptions. Transaction simulation can happen through the simulateTransaction RPC method, preflight checks inside sendTransaction, or specialized bundle and bot pipelines that repeatedly simulate against fresh state before deciding to submit.

Related terms

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Networkblockhash

Blockhash (Recent)

A 32-byte hash derived from the bank's state at a given slot, included in every Solana transaction to prove the transaction was created recently and to prevent replay attacks. A blockhash remains valid for approximately 150 slots (~60–90 seconds at normal slot times); transactions submitted with an expired blockhash are rejected outright. Clients must fetch a fresh blockhash before signing and ideally reuse it for as short a window as possible to maximize landing probability.

Networkdurable-nonce

Durable Nonce

A mechanism that replaces the short-lived recent blockhash in a transaction with a nonce value stored in a dedicated on-chain nonce account, allowing the transaction to remain valid indefinitely until it is used or the nonce is advanced. The nonce account stores the current nonce hash and an authority; the first instruction of any durable-nonce transaction must be AdvanceNonceAccount, which updates the nonce and invalidates the old one. Durable nonces are essential for workflows requiring offline signing, hardware security modules, or multi-party approval over extended time periods.

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.

More in category

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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.