Architecture

At the heart of the protocol’s architecture lies the Solana cluster – a set of validators working together to serve client transactions and maintain a ledger. At any given moment, a cluster has a leader, with the role being in rotation among all validators participating in that cluster. The cluster leader is responsible for bundling and timestamping incoming client transactions (which are first received by validators and then relayed to the leader) by utilizing the PoH algorithm. Then the leader pushes them onto the cluster’s ‘data plane’. From there they are validated by the validators and added to the ledger.