Supporting Solana with real-time onchain data

Today, we’re excited to announce a major infrastructure milestone at Token Terminal: real-time support for Solana’s onchain data, powered by our 4th-generation data stack built for scale, cost-efficiency, and accuracy.

The problem

Solana is one of the fastest-growing ecosystems in the blockchain industry. Its speed, throughput, and developer velocity have made it a magnet for users, protocols, and enterprise partners. Naturally, this has also made it a strategically critical chain for Token Terminal and one of our most requested integrations.

But Solana introduces a unique challenge: it produces more onchain data than any other blockchain. In fact, Solana generates 50× more raw data than Ethereum, creating massive volumes of transactions that must be decoded, normalized, stored, and updated continuously.

For a data company, supporting Solana at scale is not as simple as adding another chain.

It requires:

• Processing huge throughput in real time

• Decoding and maintaining accuracy across every version of every program

• Storing petabyte-scale data efficiently

• Keeping compute costs sustainable

The solution

Over the past year, our engineering team rebuilt Token Terminal’s Solana pipeline from the ground up. The result is a fully controlled, cost-efficient, and real-time Solana system that we operate entirely in-house.

We rebuilt:

• Decoding: A custom Solana decoder that automatically adjusts to all historical IDL and program versions
  

• Token tables: High-precision token metadata and supply indexing built from raw onchain data
  

• Price feeds: Real-time price resolution optimized for Solana’s high-frequency activity

Through advanced partitioning, clustering, compression strategies, and optimized query patterns, we reduced our historical Solana data warehouse cost from $40k → $4k/month, while simultaneously adding real-time ingestion that stays within seconds of finalized blocks.

What was once our biggest infrastructure bottleneck is now a competitive advantage.

What we built

Each component of our new Solana stack solves a hard technical problem that blocked real scalability in the past.

1. Automatic versioning in decoding

Solana programs update frequently. Our custom decoder is built to handle this natively: it automatically adapts to every historical IDL, allowing us to maintain unified, program-first decoded tables that cover the entire history of any Solana program.

This already surpasses industry alternatives like Dune, where users must manually parse raw Solana instructions per IDL version, a process that quickly becomes unmanageable for fast-moving protocols such as Jupiter.

2. Optimized data warehouse

High-volume chains require data warehouse design patterns that scale:

• Advanced table partitioning

• Column-level clustering

• Optimized storage strategies

• Cost-efficient and incremental transformation logic

These optimizations reduced warehouse spending by over 90%, while significantly improving query latency and analytics throughput.

3. Real-time ingestion

We rebuilt our ingestion engine to operate at the speed Solana demands:

• Real-time ingestion within seconds of block finalization

• In-flight normalization from nested structures to flattened, analytics-ready tables

• Built-in observability with continuous monitoring of sync health, schema, and data completeness

This real-time foundation now powers metrics, dashboards, alerts, and enterprise integrations across Token Terminal: and will next be extended to the rest of the 100+ chains we support.

Why now

Supporting Solana has been a multi-year effort, but the payoff has been transformative. By solving the hardest onchain data problem in the industry, we unlocked:

• Enterprise-grade reliability that’s supporting ongoing collaboration with partners like Google

• Sustainable infrastructure costs that scale with the ecosystem

• A fully proprietary Solana data infrastructure owned and operated entirely by Token Terminal

Solana went from our most difficult technical challenge to one of our clearest competitive advantages.

Looking ahead

Our long-term mission is to make onchain data auditable, standardized, and trusted; the financial data layer of crypto. Building real-time Solana support was the ultimate test.

By overcoming it, we’ve proven our infrastructure can support any blockchain, regardless of speed, volume, or complexity. Solving it unlocked the foundation for everything that comes next.

If you're building in the Solana ecosystem and want access to decoded, high-quality onchain data, reach out to us here or contact us at [email protected].