Solana

• Solana is an active blockchain and smart-contract platform that boasts much faster block speeds than Ethereum

• Solana uses the SOL (1 million “Lamports”) token as its cryptocurrency

• Unlike Ethereum, the site of modification of a smart-contract (called “program” in Solana) is limited, to “accounts” (variable units of storage) that a program owns

• Account structure:

  pub struct Account {
      /// lamports in the account
      pub lamports: u64,
      /// data held in this account
      pub data: Vec<u8>,
      /// the program that owns this account. If executable, the program that loads this account.
      pub owner: Pubkey,
      /// this account's data contains a loaded program (and is now read-only)
      pub executable: bool,
      /// the epoch at which this account will next owe rent
      pub rent_epoch: Epoch,
  }

• There are two types of accounts, determined by the value of the executable flag on the account data:

  • Accounts with executable: false simply store data that is readable and writable
  • Accounts with executable: true are known as programs (i.e. smart contracts) and contain executable code
    The executable program in these accounts can read and write from the data of accounts owned by them

Tokens

A few commonly used instructions include:

• InitializeMint: Create a new mint account to represent a new type of token.
• InitializeAccount: Create a new token account to hold units of a specific type of token (mint).
• MintTo: Create new units of a specific type of token and add them to a token account. This increases the supply of the token and can only be done by the mint authority of the mint account.
• Transfer: Transfer units of a specific type of token from one token account to another.