Reading from Network

Now, let's explore how to read data from the Solana network. We'll fetch a few different accounts to understand the structure of a Solana account.

On Solana, all data is contained in what we call "accounts". You can think of data on Solana as a public database with a single "Accounts" table, where each entry in this table is an individual account with the same base Account type.

Accounts

Accounts on Solana can store "state" or "executable" programs, all of which can be thought of as entries in the same "Accounts" table. Each account has an "address" (public key) that serves as its unique ID used to locate its corresponding on-chain data.

Solana accounts contain either:

State: This is data that's meant to be read from and persisted. It could be information about tokens, user data, or any other type of data defined within a program.
Executable Programs: These are accounts that contain the actual code of Solana programs. They contain the instructions that can be executed on the network.

This separation of program code and program state is a key feature of Solana's Account Model. For more details, refer to the Solana Account Model page.

Fetch Playground Wallet

Let's start by looking at a familiar account - your own Playground Wallet! We'll fetch this account and examine its structure to understand what a basic Solana account looks like.

Open Example

Click this link to open the example in Solana Playground. You'll see the following code:

client.ts

const address = pg.wallet.publicKey;
const accountInfo = await pg.connection.getAccountInfo(address);
 
console.log(JSON.stringify(accountInfo, null, 2));

Run Example

In the Playground terminal, type the run command and hit enter:

Terminal

run

When you run the code, you'll see the account details for your wallet displayed in the terminal. The output should look similar to the following:

Fetch Token Program

Next, we'll examine the Token Extensions program, an executable program for interacting with tokens on Solana.

Open Example

Click this link to open the example in Solana Playground. You'll see the following code:

client.ts

import { PublicKey } from "@solana/web3.js";
 
const address = new PublicKey("TokenzQdBNbLqP5VEhdkAS6EPFLC1PHnBqCXEpPxuEb");
const accountInfo = await pg.connection.getAccountInfo(address);
 
console.log(JSON.stringify(accountInfo, null, 2));

Instead of fetching your Playground wallet, here we fetch the Token Extensions Program account.

Run Example

Run the code using the run command in the terminal.

Terminal

run

Examine the output and how this program account differs from your wallet account.

Fetch Mint Account

In this step, we'll examine a Mint account, which represents a unique token on the Solana network.

Open Example

Click this link to open the example in Solana Playground. You'll see the following code:

client.ts

import { PublicKey } from "@solana/web3.js";
 
const address = new PublicKey("C33qt1dZGZSsqTrHdtLKXPZNoxs6U1ZBfyDkzmj6mXeR");
const accountInfo = await pg.connection.getAccountInfo(address);
 
console.log(JSON.stringify(accountInfo, null, 2));

In this example, we'll fetch the address of an existing Mint account on devnet.

Run Example

Run the code using the run command.

Terminal

run

Deserialize Mint Account Data

An account's data field contains bytes that need to be further deserialized into the expected data type. The structure of this data is defined by the program that owns the account.

To help with deserialization, most program developers provide helper functions in their client libraries that handle converting the raw bytes into the appropriate data type.

For example, the @solana/spl-token library provides functions like getMint() to help deserialize a token mint account's bytes into the Mint data type.

Open this next example in Solana Playground. You'll see the following code:

client.ts

import { PublicKey } from "@solana/web3.js";
import { getMint, TOKEN_2022_PROGRAM_ID } from "@solana/spl-token";
 
const address = new PublicKey("C33qt1dZGZSsqTrHdtLKXPZNoxs6U1ZBfyDkzmj6mXeR");
const mintData = await getMint(
  pg.connection,
  address,
  "confirmed",
  TOKEN_2022_PROGRAM_ID,
);
 
console.log(
  JSON.stringify(
    mintData,
    (key, value) => {
      // Convert BigInt to String
      if (typeof value === "bigint") {
        return value.toString();
      }
      // Handle Buffer objects
      if (Buffer.isBuffer(value)) {
        return `<Buffer ${value.toString("hex")}>`;
      }
      return value;
    },
    2,
  ),
);

This example uses the getMint helper function to automatically deserialize the data field of the Mint account.

Run the code using the run command.

Terminal

run

You should see the following deserialized Mint account data.

Reading from Network

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