Solana Architecture

Solana's Architecture

Solana's architecture is designed around 8 key innovations that work together to achieve unprecedented throughput.

The Runtime

The Solana runtime (called Sealevel) is the parallel smart contract execution engine. Unlike Ethereum's sequential EVM, Sealevel can process thousands of smart contracts in parallel.

┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│           Solana Runtime (Sealevel)      │
├─────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  ┌─────┐  ┌─────┐  ┌─────┐  ┌─────┐   │
│  │ TX1 │  │ TX2 │  │ TX3 │  │ TX4 │   │
│  └──┬──┘  └──┬──┘  └──┬──┘  └──┬──┘   │
│     │        │        │        │        │
│  ┌──▼──┐  ┌──▼──┐  ┌──▼──┐  ┌──▼──┐   │
│  │Prog1│  │Prog2│  │Prog1│  │Prog3│   │
│  └─────┘  └─────┘  └─────┘  └─────┘   │
│     ▲ Parallel Execution ▲              │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘

Account Model

Everything in Solana is an account. Programs are accounts, data is stored in accounts, even your wallet is an account.

interface Account {
  lamports: number;      // Balance in lamports (1 SOL = 1B lamports)
  data: Uint8Array;      // Arbitrary data
  owner: PublicKey;       // Program that owns this account
  executable: boolean;   // Is this a program?
  rentEpoch: number;     // Rent tracking
}

Key Concepts

Programs vs Smart Contracts

On Solana, we call them programs, not smart contracts. Key differences: