Solana Transaction Building

This skill covers how to construct, simulate, and inspect Solana transactions programmatically. It addresses the full anatomy of a Solana transaction — from raw instruction encoding to versioned transaction formats, compute budget management, priority fees, and address lookup tables.

Safety: This skill is for transaction construction and analysis only. Scripts in this skill NEVER sign or submit real transactions. Always simulate before sending. Never auto-sign.

Transaction Anatomy

A Solana transaction consists of:

1. Signatures: One or more Ed25519 signatures (64 bytes each)
2. Message: The serializable payload containing:
   • Header: Counts of required signers, read-only signers, read-only non-signers
   • Account keys: Array of all pubkeys referenced by instructions
   • Recent blockhash: 32-byte hash for replay protection (expires ~60-90 seconds)
   • Instructions: Array of program calls

Transaction Size Limit