A reward tally credited to a validator's vote account each time one of its votes reaches the root (becomes finalized). Vote credits accumulate throughout an epoch and are used at epoch boundaries to calculate staking rewards — validators with more credits earn proportionally more rewards for themselves and their delegators. Credits incentivize consistent, timely voting.
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A reward tally credited to a validator's vote account each time one of its votes reaches the root (becomes finalized). Vote credits accumulate throughout an epoch and are used at epoch boundaries to calculate staking rewards — validators with more credits earn proportionally more rewards for themselves and their delegators. Credits incentivize consistent, timely voting.
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Vote Credit (vote-credit) Category: Network Definition: A reward tally credited to a validator's vote account each time one of its votes reaches the root (becomes finalized). Vote credits accumulate throughout an epoch and are used at epoch boundaries to calculate staking rewards — validators with more credits earn proportionally more rewards for themselves and their delegators. Credits incentivize consistent, timely voting. Related: Vote Account, Staking Rewards, Root
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An on-chain account that records a validator's Tower BFT votes and tracks their voting history. Each validator has one vote account that stores the last 32 vote slots with their confirmation counts. The vote account also tracks earned credits used to calculate epoch rewards. Vote transactions constitute ~70-80% of all transactions on Solana.
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.
A block that has reached maximum lockout depth in Tower BFT, meaning 31 or more consecutive confirmations have been built on top of it. Once a block becomes a root, it and all its ancestors are considered irreversibly finalized. The root corresponds to the 'finalized' commitment level in RPC queries and advances monotonically as the cluster processes new blocks.
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A special-purpose transaction submitted by each validator every slot to record its vote on the current fork of the blockchain, serving as the on-chain mechanism for Solana's Tower BFT consensus. Vote transactions are exempt from compute unit limits and priority fee requirements, are processed by a dedicated vote transaction path separate from user transactions, and account for the majority of raw TPS on the network (typically 70–80% of all transactions). Validators pay vote transaction fees from their vote account, which is one reason validator economics require sufficient stake to cover ongoing operating costs.
The percentage of staking rewards that a validator retains before distributing the remainder to its delegators, configurable from 0% to 100%. A validator with 5% commission keeps 5% of all inflation rewards earned by its stake and passes 95% to delegators. Commission rates are set by the validator operator and can be changed at any time, though significant increases may cause delegators to redelegate. Delegators should monitor commission changes as part of validator selection.
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An on-chain account that records a validator's Tower BFT votes and tracks their voting history. Each validator has one vote account that stores the last 32 vote slots with their confirmation counts. The vote account also tracks earned credits used to calculate epoch rewards. Vote transactions constitute ~70-80% of all transactions on Solana.
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.
A block that has reached maximum lockout depth in Tower BFT, meaning 31 or more consecutive confirmations have been built on top of it. Once a block becomes a root, it and all its ancestors are considered irreversibly finalized. The root corresponds to the 'finalized' commitment level in RPC queries and advances monotonically as the cluster processes new blocks.
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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.
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.
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.
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.