A plain word list for Solana trading automation
Forty terms you will meet in the first week, each written as one short paragraph in ordinary language. Where a word is used loosely elsewhere, the entry says which meaning is being used here.
This list is deliberately flat. There are no tiers, no difficulty ratings and no cross-reference maze, because looking a word up should take one glance rather than a journey. Entries are alphabetical and self-contained: if one definition needs another term, that term is named plainly rather than assumed.
Terms that carry a common misunderstanding say so inside the definition itself rather than in a note underneath. If you want the same ideas at length instead of in a sentence, each of the six explainers develops one cluster of them properly.
A
- Address
- Your public identifier on Solana, written as a string of 32 to 44 letters and digits. It is derived from a private key and is safe to share. Anyone holding it can look up every transaction the address has ever made, because the chain is public by design.
- Aggregator
- A service that reads transactions out of blocks and presents them as charts, prices and volume figures. Two aggregators can print different numbers for the same token because each decides for itself which pools, programs and routers to count.
- Automated market maker
- The design used by most Solana exchanges, where a program holds two tokens and prices every swap with a formula rather than matching buyers to sellers. Usually shortened to AMM. It removes the need for anyone to sit and quote prices.
B
- Base fee
- The fixed network charge for processing a transaction, set at 5,000 lamports per signature. It is paid whether the transaction succeeds or fails, and for most swaps it is by far the smallest of the costs involved.
- Blockhash
- A reference to a recent block that every transaction must carry, which stops old transactions being replayed later. The reference expires after roughly 150 blocks, about a minute, after which the transaction is simply rejected as too old.
- Bonding curve
- A pricing mechanism used by launchpads where the price of a token depends only on how many have been sold so far. It lets a token trade the moment it exists, without anybody depositing liquidity first.
- Bundler
- A tool that groups several transactions so they execute together in the same block, usually at the moment of a launch. It is a different tool from a volume bot, which runs continuously over a longer period.
C
- Compute unit
- The measure of processing work a Solana transaction is allowed to consume. You declare a budget for it, and the budget combines with a price per unit to determine the priority fee you pay for faster inclusion.
- Constant product formula
- The rule used by most pools: the amount of one token multiplied by the amount of the other must stay the same after a swap. It is the reason a large trade against a shallow pool gets a much worse price.
D
- Depth
- How much is sitting in a pool. Depth determines how far a trade of a given size moves the price. It is measured from deposits, which makes it a completely different quantity from volume, which is measured from trades.
- DEX
- Short for decentralised exchange: a program on the chain that swaps one token for another without an intermediary holding your funds. On Solana most of them work against pools rather than order books.
F
- Fully diluted valuation
- The total token supply multiplied by the current price, often shown next to market capitalisation. It answers a hypothetical question about every token existing at once, so it is easy to quote and easy to misread.
- Funding wallet
- The wallet that holds the budget for an automated run and distributes SOL to the wallets that will do the trading. Sometimes called the master or parent wallet. Its funding history is public like any other address.
G
- Graduation
- The moment a launchpad closes a token bonding curve and opens an ordinary liquidity pool instead, moving the collected funds across. Also called migration. Fee rates, depth and the target program all change at that point.
I
- Impermanent loss
- The gap between holding two tokens and depositing them into a pool, which appears when their relative price moves. The name is misleading on both words: it does not reverse on its own and it is not a loss in the usual sense.
L
- Lamport
- The smallest unit of SOL, worth one billionth of one SOL. Every amount on Solana is really an integer number of lamports, which is why balances are displayed with nine decimal places.
- Liquidity
- The tokens deposited into a pool and available to trade against. High liquidity means trades move the price less. It is provided by people making deposits, and it can be withdrawn again unless it has been locked or burned.
- LP token
- A receipt issued to somebody who deposits into a pool, recording what share of it they own. Returning the receipt withdraws the share. Burning or locking it is what people mean by liquidity being locked.
M
- Micro-lamport
- One millionth of a lamport, the unit used to quote the price you are willing to pay per compute unit. It exists because priority fees need finer granularity than a whole lamport allows.
- Mint
- The account that defines a token: its supply, its decimals and who may create more. Used as a noun for the token address itself and as a verb for creating new units of it.
P
- Pool
- An account controlled by a program that holds two tokens and swaps between them for anybody who asks. The two balances and the pricing formula are all there is; there is no stored price and no counterparty.
- Price impact
- The price movement your own trade causes by changing the ratio inside the pool. It is fully determined by your trade size and the pool depth, and it is already included in any quote you are shown.
- Priority fee
- An optional extra payment that makes your transaction more attractive to include when there is competition for space. It is the compute budget you requested multiplied by the price per unit you set.
- Private key
- The secret half of a keypair, which is what actually controls an address. Anyone who obtains it controls that address permanently. There is no reset and no authority that can reverse what it authorises.
R
- Rent
- A deposit that accounts must hold to remain stored on the chain. A standard token account needs roughly 0.002 SOL, which is refundable when the account is closed and is a real cost when funding many wallets.
- Router
- A service that works out which pool or combination of pools gives the best result for a swap, sometimes splitting one trade across several. It usually improves larger trades and adds a dependency to every transaction.
- RPC endpoint
- The server a program talks to in order to read chain state and submit transactions. Public endpoints are rate limited, and a surprising share of automation failures are the endpoint refusing work rather than a bug.
S
- Seed phrase
- Twelve or twenty-four ordinary words that encode the number from which your keys are generated. It is not a password and nobody can reset it. Anyone who reads it holds every wallet derived from it.
- Signature
- The cryptographic proof that the holder of a private key authorised a specific transaction. Each one costs 5,000 lamports, and a transaction can carry more than one when several accounts must approve it.
- Slippage
- The difference between the price you were quoted and the price you received, caused by the pool moving between the quote and the execution. It is distinct from price impact, which is the movement you caused yourself.
- Slippage tolerance
- A limit written into a transaction: deliver at least this much or fail. It cannot obtain a better price. Setting it tighter produces more failures, and setting it wider accepts whatever the pool happens to offer.
- Slot
- A scheduled opportunity for a validator to produce a block, targeted at roughly 400 milliseconds on Solana. Slots explain why transaction expiry is measured in about a minute rather than in hours.
- Sniper
- A tool that watches for a specific event, such as a pool opening, and tries to trade before others do. Unlike a volume bot it cares about being early rather than about how the chart looks afterwards.
- SPL token
- A token created under the standard token program on Solana. Nearly everything that is not SOL itself is one, and holding any of them requires a separate token account for that particular mint.
T
- Token account
- A small account holding one wallet balance of one particular token. It must exist before that wallet can receive the token, and it carries a rent deposit that is only released when the account is closed.
- Trading volume
- The total value traded over a stated period. It counts turnover rather than direction or profit, and every published figure is a third-party reconstruction from block data rather than an official number.
V
- Volume bot
- A program that trades a chosen token repeatedly from wallets under one operator, so that the token records recent activity. It produces turnover and costs, and it has no mechanism for creating demand or depth.
W
- Wash trading
- Trading with yourself to create a misleading impression of activity. It describes conduct rather than a product, and it is the concept financial regulation uses when it addresses manufactured volume.
- Worker wallet
- One of the disposable wallets an automated run generates and funds to place trades. Each needs a small SOL float plus a rent deposit, so wallet count is a real budget line rather than a free setting.
- Wrapped SOL
- SOL held as a standard token rather than as a native balance, because pool programs expect tokens on both sides. Tools wrap and unwrap it automatically, and the temporary account carries its own rent deposit.
40 terms, maintained by The Plain Solana Desk. If a definition here has gone stale or is simply wrong, the desk would rather hear about it than leave it standing, and there is a page for that. Questions that need more than a sentence are answered on the questions page.