Solana glossary
We wrote this glossary because the docs are scattered. Orca calls it a tick array, Meteora calls it a bin array, Raydium calls it neither, and the official Solana docs assume you already know what an Anchor discriminator is. If you're shipping a bot, decoding a Geyser stream, or trying to figure out why your swap landed at a worse price than you quoted, the term you're looking for probably lives below. Each entry has a one-paragraph definition, a longer explanation, real program IDs, and a link to where the concept matters in production.
Twenty terms across DEX accounts, validator infrastructure, transaction primitives, and the account model. Last reviewed April 2026.
DEX & liquidity
Validator & infra
Transaction primitives
Account model
How to use this glossary
Start with the category that matches what you're building. If you're writing a market-making bot on Orca or Meteora, the DEX section covers the accounts you'll be reading every block. If you're running a validator or wiring up a streaming pipeline, the validator and infra section walks through Geyser plugins and Yellowstone gRPC. The transaction primitives section is for anyone trying to land transactions reliably during congestion. The account model section covers the Anchor and PDA concepts you'll hit the first time you decode an instruction by hand.
Each page is short on purpose. We picked the 20 terms developers actually ask us about in support tickets, not the 200 someone might list for completeness. If a term you needed isn't here, email us and we'll add it.
Want to skip the decoding work entirely? Our Enhanced Streams deliver every event from these programs already parsed, and our gRPC nodes expose Yellowstone directly if you want to roll your own decoder.