Coverage

The full index of the shelf.

A card catalogue drawer with hand-written subject cards

The shelf is organised by subject, the way a card catalogue organises a library. Below is the index of what the room currently spans, followed by a short working glossary of the terms a reader meets most often.

Subjects on the shelf

  • The runtime. Ticks, slots, the Sealevel scheduler, and how parallel work is decided each tick.
  • The account model. Accounts, owners, rent, lamports held, and how a program account keeps itself alive.
  • Proof of Stake. Stake accounts, voting credits, commission, activation and deactivation, and what finality means here.
  • Programs and instructions. Cross-program invocation, instruction ordering, and why a call is rejected.
  • Tokens. The token program, token extensions, and what a designer can encode directly on an account.
  • Validators and gossip. The gossip layer, leader schedule, and how a validator learns who is due to produce.

A short working glossary

SVM
The execution environment that runs a program's instructions inside a single transaction. Often contrasted with the EVM; the SVM is built around accounts rather than a single stored contract.
Sealevel
The scheduler that decides which instructions can run in parallel within a tick, by checking which accounts each instruction reads or writes.
Rent
The lamports an account must hold to stay alive in storage. An account that falls below the threshold is removed and its data lost.
Lamport
The smallest unit of the native token. One lamport is to the native token what one wei is to ether.
Slot
The period in which a leader produces a block. Slots are the chain's basic unit of time.
Stake account
An account that authorises a validator to vote on its behalf and earn voting credits, which become rewards.
Vote credit
A counter a validator earns for each correct vote; credits are converted into rewards at the end of an epoch.
Commission
The fraction of rewards a validator keeps before splitting the rest with its stakers; set on the stake account.

If a term you need is not here, ask the desk and we will add it to the glossary.