Solana Fundamentals Best Practices

The foundations to internalize before writing programs, clients, or infrastructure on Agave 4.1.1.

How to Use This List

• Walk A through C before your first program deploy
• Revisit D when onboarding new team members from EVM backgrounds
• Treat E as a pre-mainnet gate - every item should pass

A - Mental Model

• State lives in accounts, not programs. Programs are stateless executables that read/write accounts passed to them.
• Every entity is an account. Wallets, programs, token mints, and data structs are all accounts with lamports, owner, and data fields.
• Transactions declare all accounts upfront. Sealevel uses this list for parallel scheduling and lock enforcement.
• Only the owner program writes account data. Security follows from ownership rules, not from hiding addresses.

B - Currency and Precision

• Store and transmit lamports as integers. Use bigint in TypeScript; avoid f64 casts in Rust programs.
• Convert SOL to lamports at the UI boundary. Parse decimal strings with integer math, not floating point.
• Read SPL decimals separately from SOL. Token amounts use mint-specific decimals, not 1e9.
• Fund new accounts to rent-exempt minimum. Query getMinimumBalanceForRentExemption before init.

C - Clusters and Environment

• Default to devnet for application development. Use local validator (Surfpool 0.12.0 or solana-test-validator) for CI.
• Pin RPC URL, CLI config, and wallet network to the same cluster. Mismatches produce "account not found" errors.
• Never airdrop or test with mainnet keypairs. Use separate keypair files per environment.
• Verify genesis hash when debugging cluster issues. solana genesis-hash confirms you are on the intended network.

D - Keys and Signing

• Never commit keypair JSON to version control. Add *.json key files to .gitignore; use secrets managers in production.
• Mark every signing account with isSigner: true. Missing signer flags cause runtime rejection.
• Use PDAs for program-controlled addresses. Users sign; programs sign for PDAs via seeds.
• Keep fee payer funded but not over-funded. Service wallets hold minimal SOL for fees only.

E - Transactions and Confirmation

• Use confirmed commitment for most dapp actions. Reserve finalized for high-value settlements.
• Refresh blockhash on every retry. Expired blockhashes cause silent drops.
• Simulate before submit during development. Decode program errors from simulation logs.
• Subscribe to signature notifications over polling. WebSockets reduce RPC load and latency.
• Read explorer logs for failed transactions. On-chain errors are in program logs, not just RPC error codes.

FAQs

solana config set --url devnet && solana airdrop 2

Related

• Solana Basics - hands-on orientation examples
• The Solana Mental Model vs. EVM - deepest model shift
• How a Transaction Flows - confirmation best practices in context

Stack versions: This page was written for Agave 4.1.1, Solana CLI 3.0.10, Anchor 0.32.1, anchor-lang 0.32.1, Rust 1.91.1, @solana/kit 7.0.0, Surfpool 0.12.0, and LiteSVM 0.6.x.