◆ GLOSSARY
Solana glossary
20 TERMS · RPC · gRPC · SHREDS · LANDING
Plain-language definitions of the terms that come up around Solana RPC and high-frequency trading infrastructure. Built by the team running the nodes.
- Commitment level
- How settled a piece of Solana state is when you read it. Read more →
- Co-location
- Running your infrastructure physically close to Solana stake clusters and the Jito Block Engine, in the same datacenters, to minimize network hops and distance. Read more →
- Decoded shreds
- Transactions reconstructed and decoded straight from the shred propagation layer, before any block is assembled. Read more →
- Dedicated node
- A private, single-tenant Solana node provisioned to your specs on bare metal, rather than shared multi-tenant infrastructure. Read more →
- First-seen
- The earliest moment you can observe a transaction - while its block is still propagating as shreds, before any validator has rolled it into a confirmed block. Read more →
- Geyser
- Solana's plugin interface that lets account, transaction, slot, and block data flow out of a validator the moment it is processed. Read more →
- gRPC
- A high-performance, streaming RPC protocol. Read more →
- Jito Block Engine
- Infrastructure that runs an auction for bundles of transactions on Solana. Read more →
- Jito bundle
- A set of transactions that execute all-or-nothing, in a specific order, submitted to the Jito Block Engine with a tip. Read more →
- Leader
- The validator responsible for producing the block for a given slot. Read more →
- MEV
- Maximal Extractable Value - the profit a participant can capture by influencing the inclusion and ordering of transactions in a block (for example, arbitrage or liquidations). Read more →
- Priority fee
- A compute-unit price you attach to a transaction. Read more →
- QUIC
- The UDP-based transport protocol Solana validators use to accept transactions at the TPU. Read more →
- RPC (JSON-RPC)
- Remote Procedure Call - the request/response API you use to read Solana state and submit transactions over HTTP, plus WebSocket subscriptions. Read more →
- Shred
- The smallest unit of a Solana block - a network-sized, erasure-coded packet of block data. Read more →
- Slot
- A roughly 400-millisecond window in which a designated leader can produce a block. Read more →
- Stake-weighted QoS (SWQoS)
- A mechanism that prioritizes transactions arriving over connections backed by stake. Read more →
- TPU
- Transaction Processing Unit - the ingress on the current leader that accepts transactions over QUIC. Read more →
- Turbine
- Solana's block propagation protocol, which fans shreds out across the validator set in a tree so a large block can reach the whole cluster quickly. Read more →
- Yellowstone gRPC
- The widely-used gRPC implementation of Solana's Geyser plugin interface. Read more →