Accounts and Rent

On Solana, the account is the single primitive that everything else is built from. A wallet is an account, every deployed program is an account, and each SPL token holding lives in its own account too — there is no separate balance ledger hiding behind the scenes. Because programs are stateless, they read and write the data accounts they own, so understanding what an account stores and how it stays alive is the foundation for nearly every read you will make against https://solana.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY. After this guide you will be able to fetch an account's full state, tell native SOL from lamports, calculate the rent-exempt minimum for a given data size, and avoid the common decoding and precision mistakes that trip up newcomers.

Core Concepts

• What an account holds. Every account carries a lamports balance, an owner (the program that controls it), a raw data byte buffer, an executable flag (true for programs), a rentEpoch field, and a fixed space — the byte size chosen when the account was created.
• Lamports vs SOL. Balances are denominated in lamports, the smallest unit of the native token. 1 SOL = 1,000,000,000 lamports (1e9), so a 1 SOL wallet reports lamports: 1000000000.
• Rent exemption. To persist, an account must hold at least the rent-exempt minimum for its data size — roughly two years of rent paid up front. Fund it below that threshold and the runtime can reclaim it; fund it at or above and it lives indefinitely with no ongoing charge.
• PDAs and program-owned data. A Program Derived Address (PDA) is an account address derived deterministically from a program id plus seeds, with no matching private key. Programs own these data accounts and are the only entity allowed to mutate their data, which is how Solana programs store on-chain state.
• Non-existent accounts. getAccountInfo returns null when the address has never been funded or created. A null result is not an error — it simply means the account does not yet exist.

Reading Account State

1import { Connection, PublicKey, LAMPORTS_PER_SOL } from '@solana/web3.js';
2 
3const connection = new Connection('https://solana.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY', 'confirmed');
4 
5// Read full account state (use base64 for data larger than 128 bytes)
6const pubkey = new PublicKey('9WzDXwBbmkg8ZTbNMqUxvQRAyrZzDsGYdLVL9zYtAWWM');
7const info = await connection.getAccountInfo(pubkey, 'confirmed');
8 
9if (info === null) {
10  console.log('Account does not exist yet');
11} else {
12  console.log('Owner:', info.owner.toBase58());
13  console.log('Balance (SOL):', info.lamports / LAMPORTS_PER_SOL);
14  console.log('Data length:', info.data.length);
15}
16 
17// Minimum lamports for a 165-byte token account to be rent-exempt
18const rentExempt = await connection.getMinimumBalanceForRentExemption(165);
19console.log('Rent-exempt minimum (lamports):', rentExempt);

Best Practices

• Fund to the rent-exempt minimum. Call getMinimumBalanceForRentExemption for the account's data size and fund new accounts with at least that many lamports, or the runtime may garbage-collect them.
• Pick the right encoding. Request base64 (or base64+zstd for large buffers) for any account whose data exceeds 128 bytes — the default base58 encoding fails above that size.
• Branch on null first. Always check for a null result before reading owner, lamports, or data; a missing account is normal, not an exception to crash on.
• Batch your reads. When you need many accounts, use getMultipleAccounts in one call instead of firing a separate getAccountInfo per address — fewer round trips and lower compute-unit cost.
• Keep lamport math integer. Work with lamports as integers or BigInt and divide by 1e9 only for display. Doing arithmetic in floating-point SOL silently loses precision at large balances.

See also

• getAccountInfo - Read on-chain account state
• getBalance - Read an account lamport balance
• getMinimumBalanceForRentExemption - Rent-exempt minimum for a size
• getMultipleAccounts - Batch account reads