CashboardGlossary · Solana
What are lamports?
A lamport is the smallest unit of SOL. One SOL is one billion lamports, and the name honors the computer scientist Leslie Lamport.
How do lamports work?
Solana counts balances and fees in lamports. One SOL is 1,000,000,000 lamports, so one lamport is 0.000000001 SOL. The name comes from Leslie Lamport, who won the 2013 Turing Award for his work on distributed systems. His logical clocks influenced Solana's design.
Fees go one step smaller. The base fee is 5,000 lamports per signature. Priority fees are priced in micro-lamports, one millionth of a lamport, for every compute unit a transaction requests. That tiny unit lets a fee scale smoothly from transactions that use a few hundred compute units to ones that use over a million.
With made-up inputs of one signature, a 300,000 compute unit limit and 20,000 micro-lamports per unit, the base fee is 5,000 lamports and the priority fee 6,000. Total 11,000 lamports, or 0.000011 SOL.
Rent deposits, stake minimums and program deployments are in lamports too, and RPC nodes report every balance that way. So the lamport-to-SOL conversion is the first thing any Solana tool has to get right. Nine decimal places off is a very visible bug.
Also called: lamport, micro-lamports.
Where do lamports show up in Cashboard?
Chain status reports Solana's median priority fee, which is where micro-lamports show up on the board. Solana watch-only portfolios read native SOL balances from a public address.
Frequently asked questions
How many lamports are in one SOL?
One billion. One SOL equals 1,000,000,000 lamports, and a micro-lamport, the unit priority fees are priced in, is one millionth of a lamport.
Where can you read more about lamports?
Related terms
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