How Substreams Unlocks Solana Account Data

Solana’s architecture is built for speed. By separating transaction execution from account state, the network enables thousands of transactions per second to execute independently across different accounts. This high-throughput design is what makes Solana uniquely powerful, but it also introduces challenges for developers working with on-chain data.

Solana’s data model stores critical information—like token balances, NFT metadata, and program state—inside accounts that are decoupled from transaction or block data.

This separation is what allows for unparalleled performance, but it makes accessing, tracking, and interpreting that data—especially historical data—much more complex.

The Problem: Fragmented Account Data

While Solana’s architecture is a technical breakthrough, it creates major friction when it comes to developers accessing reliable, queryable state. Developers run into four big issues:

1. RPCs Can’t Keep Up: Querying account data using getProgramAccounts (gPA) through public RPC providers like Helius or Triton is often slow, rate-limited, and costly. These endpoints weren’t built for extracting broad based insights, and they tend to fall over under load—especially during peak network activity.
2. No Historical Depth: Even when it is possible to get account data, most streaming providers (using Yellowstone) focus only on real-time data. The only other way to access historical data is by running your own archive infrastructure.
3. No re-org Awareness: Solana’s fast block times, leader schedule, and optimistic confirmations mean reorgs are a regular occurrence. Most existing tools require this to be self managed leading to misreported account state or missing deleted accounts.

Substreams: Web3’s Kafka Now Supports Solana Account Changes

Substreams solves these problems by offering a filterable, fork-aware stream of Solana account changes, bundled with decoding logic and a flexible billing model. Here are the key features offered:

• Skip the RPC Bottlenecks: Substreams leverages gRPC to stream raw Solana block data with high throughput, avoiding RPC rate limits entirely. While parallel off-chain processing supports efficient historical reprocessing, the real-time focus is on delivering block-level state updates only when changes occur—no sifting through raw data dumps or manual monitoring required.
• 3-Month Historical Window: Access up to 90 days of account change history—ideal for backfills, analytics, or syncing new systems. No other provider offers this much built-in history.
• Fork Aware by Design: Substreams tracks Solana reorgs and accounts automatically, keeping data aligned with the canonical chain.
• Built-In Decoding: Get fully decoded account changes—including system transfers and account deletions—for top Solana programs like Jupiter, Helium, and Metaplex. No custom parsing required.
• Performance Without Compromise: Substreams delivers all these features at scale, maintaining low-latency data streams even during peak demand. Parallel processing, efficient decoding, and optimized historical queries ensure speed and reliability are never sacrificed.

Real-World Example: Helium Protocol

Helium leverages Substreams to provide a more seamless user experience across wallet and app by tracking account-level state changes in near real-time.

Previously, Helium used Yellowstone to process account deletions, which required maintaining a separate transaction stream. This approach led to redundant infrastructure and manual reconciliation.

By adopting Substreams, Helium improves UX by simplifying infrastructure and significantly improving reliability.

Get Started

Ready to transform how you access Solana's account data? Learn how Substreams delivers fork-aware, historical account tracking with built-in decoding for popular programs. Check out the Substreams docs today and start building with the most reliable account data stream available for Solana.

About The Graph

The Graph  is the leading indexing and query protocol powering the decentralized internet. Launched in 2018, it has enabled tens of thousands of developers to effortlessly build  Subgraphs  and   Substreams  across countless blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, Celo, Soneium, and Avalanche.

Discover more about how The Graph is shaping the future of decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) and stay connected with the community. Follow The Graph on  X,  LinkedIn,  Instagram,  Facebook,  Reddit,  Farcaster  and  Medium. Join the community on The Graph’s  Telegram, join technical discussions on The Graph’s  Discord.

The Graph Foundation  oversees The Graph Network.  Edge & Node,  StreamingFast,  Semiotic Labs,  GraphOps,  Pinax   Wonderland  and  Geo  are seven of the many organizations within The Graph ecosystem.