Quickstart

  • Rust is the primary language for Solana smart contracts.
  • Regions of memory on-chain are called accounts.
    • Accounts pay rent to be stored on-chain.
  • PDAs are accounts that are derived from a seed and a program.
  • CPI is the cross-program invocation, which is the way to call another program from a program.
  • “Borsh” is the binary encoding format used by Solana.
    • Binary Object Representation Serializer for Hashing.
    • Think of it as a more efficient JSON.
  • Tokens on Solana come in two flavors: SPL and “Token-2022”.
    • SPL tokens are the standard token format.
    • “Token-2022” is a more advanced token format and we don’t see them much in the current environment.
  • SPL tokens use the Token program.
    • This is an on-chain program that manages token accounts. There are many of these pre-deployed programs on Solana (e.g. Token-2022 program, SPL associated token account program, address lookup table program)
  • Lots of guides/docs are incomplete or outdated. Expect to do a lot of digging and experimentation.

Guides