Solana

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 currently: 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Lots of guides/docs are incomplete or outdated.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.
- GPT-4 has a decent grasp of using @solana/web3.js and tangential libraries