Solana Rewards Program for Token Vesting and Merkle Distributions

The Rewards program distributes tokens from a program-owned vault to a set of recipients, each on a vesting schedule. An authority funds the vault and defines who receives what. Recipients claim their vested tokens over time, and the authority can revoke recipients or reclaim leftover tokens when the distribution allows it. The program is built with Pinocchio, maintained by the Solana Foundation, and works with both SPL Token and Token-2022 mints, except Token-2022 mints with the transfer hook extension.

Program ID (mainnet and devnet):

REWArDioXgQJ2fZKkfu9LCLjQfRwYWVVfsvcsR5hoXi

The program was audited by OtterSec. See AUDIT_STATUS.md for the audited-through commit.

Choose a distribution type

The program supports two distribution types. Both use the same vesting schedules and revocation modes.

	Direct	Merkle
How it works	Creates an onchain account per recipient	Stores a single merkle root onchain; recipients provide proofs to claim
Upfront cost	Payer funds rent for every recipient account	No per-recipient accounts until someone claims
Scale	Practical up to low thousands of recipients	Scales to millions of recipients; storage grows only as recipients claim
Mutability	Recipients can be added after creation	Recipient set is fixed at creation
Use it for	Small distributions that change over time	Large, fixed distributions such as airdrops

Vesting schedules

Each allocation carries one of four schedules. Timestamps are Unix seconds.

Schedule	Behavior
`Immediate`	All tokens are claimable right away
`Linear`	Tokens unlock proportionally between `startTs` and `endTs`
`Cliff`	Nothing unlocks until `cliffTs`, then everything unlocks at once
`CliffLinear`	Linear vesting from `startTs` to `endTs`, with nothing claimable until `cliffTs`; earlier accrual unlocks at the cliff

Accounts

Account	PDA seeds	Stores
`DirectDistribution`	`["direct_distribution", mint, authority, seed]`	Authority, mint, and allocation totals
`DirectRecipient`	`["direct_recipient", distribution, recipient]`	One recipient's allocation and vesting
`MerkleDistribution`	`["merkle_distribution", mint, authority, seed]`	Authority, mint, totals, and the merkle root
`MerkleClaim`	`["merkle_claim", distribution, claimant]`	Amount claimed so far by one claimant
`Revocation`	`["revocation", distribution, user]`	Marker that blocks a revoked merkle claimant

The seed is the address of an extra signer passed at creation, so one authority can run several distributions for the same mint. Each distribution's vault is the associated token account of the distribution PDA for its mint.

Instructions

Direct distribution

The authority calls CreateDirectDistribution to create the distribution PDA and its vault.
The authority calls AddDirectRecipient once per recipient with an amount and a vesting schedule. Each call transfers that amount from the authority's token account into the vault.
Recipients call ClaimDirect to withdraw vested tokens. Pass amount: 0 to claim everything currently vested.
Once a recipient has claimed everything, or the distribution is closed, CloseDirectRecipient closes the recipient account and refunds rent to the account that paid for it.
The authority calls CloseDirectDistribution to recover the remaining vault balance and rent. If clawbackTs is set, closing is allowed only after that time.

Merkle distribution

The authority builds a merkle tree offchain. Each leaf commits to a claimant, that claimant's total amount, and a vesting schedule.
The authority calls CreateMerkleDistribution with the root, the total claimable amount, and a clawbackTs, and funds the vault in the same instruction.
Claimants call ClaimMerkle with their leaf data and proof. The first claim creates the claimant's MerkleClaim account. Pass amount: 0 to claim everything currently vested.
After clawbackTs, the authority calls CloseMerkleDistribution to recover the remaining vault balance and rent.
After the distribution is closed, claimants call CloseMerkleClaim to recover the rent for their claim account.

The program hashes leaves with Keccak-256 as keccak256(0x00 || keccak256(claimant || totalAmount || schedule)), where totalAmount is a little-endian u64 and schedule uses the same encoding as the instruction's VestingSchedule argument. Proof nodes are hashed as sorted pairs, smaller hash first.

Revocation

Revocation is opt-in. The revocable bitmask set at creation chooses which modes the authority may use: bit 0 enables NonVested, bit 1 enables Full, and 0 disables revocation.

Mode	Instruction	Result
`NonVested`	`RevokeDirectRecipient` or `RevokeMerkleClaim`	Vested, unclaimed tokens go to the user; unvested tokens return to the authority
`Full`	`RevokeDirectRecipient` or `RevokeMerkleClaim`	All unclaimed tokens, vested and unvested, return to the authority

Revoking a merkle claimant creates a Revocation marker that blocks future claims, even if they have never claimed. Revoking a direct recipient closes their DirectRecipient account and refunds its rent.

Clients

The repository includes @solana/kit and Rust clients generated from the program IDL with Codama, in clients/. The client isn't published to npm yet. Build it from source with just generate-clients.

Resources

Source code
OtterSec audit report
Report an issue
Solana StackExchange, tag rewards-program

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