Chapter · Master Solana
Accounts and parallel power
On Solana, data lives in accounts, little boxes that hold information. Your wallet is an account, a token balance is an account, and even programs, Solana's word for smart contracts, live in accounts. A neat twist is that programs are kept separate from the data they act on. The code is in one box and the state it changes sits in others.
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What this lesson covers
Sealevel runs things at once
Here is the speed secret. A Solana transaction says up front exactly which accounts it will touch. Because the network knows this in advance, it can run transactions that touch different accounts at the same time, across many processor cores. This parallel engine is called Sealevel. Chains that process everything one at a time cannot do this.
What you get asked
On Solana, what is stored in accounts?
Accounts are general-purpose data boxes. Wallets, token balances, and program code all live in accounts, which keeps the model simple and flexible.
Because each transaction declares which accounts it will use, Solana can run non-overlapping ones in ___ instead of one at a time.
Knowing the accounts ahead of time lets Solana spot transactions that do not clash and process them in parallel. That parallel engine is Sealevel.
Why must a Solana transaction list the accounts it will touch?
The account list is what makes parallel execution safe. If two transactions do not share accounts, they cannot interfere, so Solana runs them side by side.
Match each Solana idea to a plain description
Accounts hold data, programs are the code, Sealevel is the parallel engine, and the account list is the map that lets the engine work safely.
The rest of this chapter
A plain-English deep dive into how Solana reaches high speed and low fees, plus the real risks around outages and memecoins.