New holders
Understand what your wallet is showing you: token accounts, rent deposits, why a transfer to a new address costs a little extra.
A codex for the Solana curious
Learn the runes
of Solana.
Slots, lamports, PDAs, priority fees, rent — every word you meet on Solana, translated into plain language and tied to what the network is doing right now.
90+ terms · 9 schools · live values from mainnet
Current slot
—
epoch —
I · The almanac
Mainnet, this very moment
Live readings used as examples throughout the codex. Refreshed from the public RPC; slot ticks every 10 seconds.
Slot—the network's heartbeat
Epoch—progress —
Transactions / s—last 60-second sample
Slot time—average over the last 60 s
Rent · token account—165 bytes, rent-exempt minimum
Priority fee · median—µ-lamports / CU on a busy pool
Inflation—annual rate this epoch
SOL price—Jupiter Price API
II · The codex
Every rune, decoded
Search or browse by school. Open a rune for its full meaning, a live example and related terms. Each glyph is generated from the word itself.
III · The trial
Name the rune
A definition appears; choose the term it describes. Questions are drawn at random from the codex.
Score 0 / 0Streak 0
…
IV · How the book works
Four pages, no magic
- ᚠ
Written by hand
Every definition is written in plain English and checked against Solana's own documentation. No AI-generated filler, no jargon used to explain jargon.
- ᚢ
Read from mainnet
On load, the almanac asks a public RPC a handful of questions — slot, epoch, performance samples, rent, fees, inflation — and asks Jupiter for the SOL price.
- ᚦ
Woven into terms
Terms like Slot, Rent or Priority fee show the live reading, so each idea is anchored to a real number you can check.
- ᚨ
Linked as a web
Related terms link to each other, so you can wander from Lamport to Rent to Account the way the concepts actually connect.
V · Who reads the runebook
Made for every kind of apprentice
Builders
A fast refresher on PDAs, CPIs, compute budgets, lookup tables and commitment levels before you write the next instruction.
Traders
Know what slippage, price impact, priority fees and bonding curves mean before they cost you.
Writers & teachers
Link a single term with #rune=slot style links and let readers see the live value next to the definition.
Security-minded
Learn the vocabulary of risk: authorities, upgradeable programs, drainers, address poisoning, simulation.
The curious
Take the trial, follow the related-term trails, and come out understanding how a blockchain doing thousands of transactions a second actually fits together.
VI · An annotated passage
The journey of one transaction
Most glossary terms appear in a single trip through the network. Follow one transfer from click to finality.
1 · Assembling
Your wallet builds a transaction: one or more instructions (each naming a program and the accounts it will read or write), a recent blockhash that proves the transaction is fresh (valid for 150 blocks — around a minute or less), and a fee payer. Optional Compute Budget instructions set a compute-unit limit and a price in micro-lamports per unit — the priority fee.
2 · Signing
Every account that must authorise the action signs the message with its private key, producing a 64-byte signature. The first signature doubles as the transaction's ID. The whole packet must fit in 1,232 bytes; address lookup tables in v0 transactions squeeze more accounts in.
3 · Forwarding
An RPC node receives it and, instead of gossiping it to a mempool, forwards it straight to the upcoming leaders from the leader schedule — the idea behind Gulf Stream. Each leader produces blocks for four consecutive slots.
4 · Executing
The leader checks the signatures, charges the base fee (5,000 lamports per signature) plus any priority fee, and runs the instructions in the SVM. Because every transaction declares which accounts it writes, non-overlapping transactions execute in parallel. Programs may call other programs through CPI. If anything fails, all state changes revert — but the fee is still paid.
5 · Confirming
The block is shredded and spread by Turbine. In the classic design, validators vote on it with Tower BFT, using Proof of History as a shared clock (the Alpenglow upgrade replaces these with Votor and Rotor). Your wallet watches the commitment climb: processed (seen by the node), confirmed (a supermajority of stake voted), finalized (rooted — effectively irreversible).
| Level | Meaning | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| processed | Included in a block the node has seen; could still be on a dropped fork | Fast UI feedback |
| confirmed | The block received votes from ≥ 2/3 of stake | Most apps and wallets |
| finalized | The block is rooted (under Tower BFT: 31+ confirmed blocks on top) | Exchanges, settlement |
VII · Questions
Frequently asked
Are these definitions official?
No — they're plain-English explanations written for clarity, cross-checked against Solana and SPL documentation. When precision matters (for example, exact fee rules), the official docs win.
Where do the live numbers come from?
The public Solana RPC at solana-rpc.publicnode.com (slot, epoch, performance samples, rent, prioritization fees, inflation) and the Jupiter Price API (SOL price).
Why does the priority-fee example use a specific pool?
Without accounts, the RPC reports the minimum fee that landed in each recent slot, which is usually zero. Asking about a busy, write-locked account (a large SOL–USDC pool) gives a more realistic picture of what competing transactions pay.
Can I link to a single term?
Yes. Open a rune and the address bar updates to something like #rune=priority-fee. Share that link and the rune opens directly.
Why does rent look different from older guides?
Rent is computed by the cluster from the account's size. Older articles quote fixed figures like 0.00203928 SOL for a token account; the almanac shows what the network returns today.
Does the trial save my score?
No. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere; refresh and you start fresh.
Is Runebook connected to a wallet?
Never. It's a read-only reference: no wallet connection, no signing, no tokens.
Limits & honesty
- A glossary, not the spec. Definitions simplify. Protocol details change through SIMDs and client upgrades; always confirm critical details in official docs.
- Live readings are snapshots. TPS comes from the most recent 60-second performance sample; slot time is an average over it. Priority fee is the median over ~150 recent slots for one busy account.
- Shared infrastructure. The almanac makes about eight requests on load and polls only the slot every 10 seconds while the tab is visible. If the RPC is busy, values show "—" with a retry.
- No advice. Explaining what a term means is not a recommendation to use any product or token.