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Solana Glossary: Rent, ATA, PDA and Lamports Explained
Plain-language definitions of Solana terms: lamport, slot, epoch, rent-exempt reserve, associated token account and priority fee — each linked to an in-depth article.
Terms
Proof of History (PoH)
Solana's cryptographic 'clock': a sequence of SHA-256 hashes proving the order and time of events before consensus. Thanks to PoH, validators don't spend time agreeing on timestamps.
Slot
The network's basic unit of time — the window in which a leader produces a block. Target slot time is ~400 ms, which is why confirmations on Solana take fractions of a second.
Epoch
A period of 432,000 slots (roughly 2–3 days). At the end of an epoch the leader schedule is recalculated and staking rewards are paid out.
Lamport
The smallest indivisible unit of SOL, like Bitcoin's satoshi. 1 SOL = 1,000,000,000 lamports. The fee for a simple transfer is 5,000 lamports.
Account Model
On Solana everything is an account: wallets, programs and data alike. An account holds lamports and arbitrary data, and each has an owner program.
Rent
The cost of keeping an account's data on the network. An account with a balance above the 'rent-exempt' threshold (~0.00089 SOL for a minimal account) is exempt from debits.
PDA (Program Derived Address)
An address derived from a program and seed parameters that has no private key. This is how programs own accounts and sign operations.
ATA (Associated Token Account)
A token account deterministically bound to a (wallet, mint) pair. To hold USDC, a wallet needs an ATA for the USDC mint — it's created on first receipt.
SPL Token
Solana's base token standard — the analogue of ERC-20. One mint account defines the ticker, decimals and supply; balances live in token accounts.
Token-2022
The extended token standard: transfer fees, confidential transfers, freezing, and metadata right inside the mint account.
Validator
A node that produces blocks and votes in Tower BFT consensus. By delegating SOL to a validator you receive a share of the inflation rewards.
Stake Account
A special account for staking: SOL is locked in it and delegated to a validator. Deactivation takes up to one epoch (cooldown).
Priority Fee
An optional surcharge on the base fee (price per compute unit in micro-lamports) that raises a transaction's priority during congested periods.
Compute Unit (CU)
The unit measuring a transaction's computational work. The default limit is 200,000 CU per instruction; a simple transfer spends ~450–1,500 CU.
Sealevel
Solana's parallel runtime: transactions that don't overlap on accounts execute simultaneously across all the validator's cores.
Gulf Stream
The protocol that forwards transactions to future leaders in advance, without an Ethereum-style mempool. It shortens confirmation time and network load.
Block Explorer
A block explorer: Solscan, SolanaFM, Solana Beach. By address or transaction signature it shows balances, transfers and program calls.
Derivation Path
The BIP-44 derivation path from which a specific key is derived from the seed phrase. Solana's standard is m/44'/501'/0'/0' (501 is SOL's coin type).
Ed25519
Solana's signature curve. The public key is the wallet address: 32 bytes in base58 encoding (32–44 characters).