What is a Solana RPC Node?
Access the world's fastest blockchain
A Solana RPC node provides applications with access to Solana's high-performance blockchain, enabling lightning-fast transaction execution, real-time account updates, and program interactions. Solana's architecture allows applications to achieve throughput impossible on traditional blockchains.
Why Solana is the fastest
Solana's breakthrough innovation is Proof of History (PoH) — a cryptographic clock enabling validators to agree on time order without communication overhead. Combined with parallel transaction processing and optimized networking, Solana achieves 400ms blocks and 65,000+ TPS while maintaining decentralization.
Solana advantages:
- Blazing speed — 400ms blocks, 65,000+ TPS capacity
- Minimal fees — transactions cost fractions of a cent
- Composability — atomic cross-program calls
- Proof of History — innovative consensus mechanism
- Growing ecosystem — dominant in NFTs, DeFi, gaming
- Developer tools — comprehensive SDK and tooling
Proof of History explained
Proof of History is a cryptographic technique that creates a verifiable passage of time between events. Validators can prove that transactions occurred in a specific order without waiting for consensus on timing, dramatically increasing throughput.
How Solana works:
- Leader validator sequences transactions with PoH timestamps
- Transactions execute in parallel across multiple cores
- Leader produces block every ~400ms
- Validators verify PoH and state transitions
- Tower BFT consensus finalizes blocks
Solana programs vs smart contracts
Solana uses programs (not smart contracts) written in Rust or C. Programs are stateless — they manipulate separate account data. This architecture enables parallel execution and extreme performance.
Popular Solana programs include SPL Token (token standard), Metaplex (NFT), and Serum/Jupiter (DEX aggregation).