Definition
The unit of storage on Solana. Every piece of state, including programs, token balances and user data, lives in an account with an owner program, a balance in lamports and a data field.
Why it matters
Almost every Solana security bug is about accounts: a program accepting an account it should have rejected. When you hire developers or auditors, how they validate account owners, signers and types tells you more about their quality than their portfolio.
What to check
- Ask how every instruction validates the owner, signer and type of each account it receives.
- Ask whether account sizes and rent were planned for growth, since resizing accounts later is awkward.
Related terms
- ProgramSolana’s term for a smart contract: executable code deployed to an account.
- PDA (program derived address)An address derived deterministically from seeds and a program ID that has no private key, so only that program can sign for it.
- RentThe SOL balance an account must hold to stay on-chain, proportional to its data size.
- DiscriminatorA short prefix stored at the start of an account or instruction that identifies its type.
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