Solana Week 2: From Terminal Logs to a Live Browser Dashboard

Source: Dev.to

Public Database

Before starting, I expected blockchain data to be cryptic and hard to reach. The reality is that Solana feels like a globally distributed public database. In a traditional app, your data is tucked away in a private SQL or NoSQL database managed by a backend server. On Solana, everything is an account and accounts are public by default; anyone with an RPC connection can read the state of an account at any time.

Terminal vs. Browser

My week was a game of two halves: working in the terminal and building in the browser.

Terminal

• Checked address balances via the Solana CLI with simple commands like solana balance.
• Logged raw transaction data to see the flow of SOL in real‑time.

Browser

• Moved balance fetching into a JavaScript frontend using the @solana/web3.js library.
• Established a Connection to the cluster and used getBalance to fetch data programmatically.

import { Connection, clusterApiUrl, LAMPORTS_PER_SOL } from '@solana/web3.js';

const connection = new Connection(clusterApiUrl('devnet'));
const publicKey = /* your public key */;

async function getSolBalance() {
  const lamports = await connection.getBalance(publicKey);
  const sol = lamports / LAMPORTS_PER_SOL;
  console.log(`Balance: ${sol} SOL`);
}

Fetching Balances

Solana doesn’t store balances as “1 SOL.” It uses Lamports, the smallest unit of SOL (1 SOL = 10⁹ Lamports). To display a user’s actual balance, divide the result by the LAMPORTS_PER_SOL constant:

SOL = Lamports / 10^9

Account History

Reading transactions is a two‑step process:

1. Fetch signatures (transaction IDs) with getSignaturesForAddress.
2. Fetch transaction details with getParsedTransaction.

A built‑in limit allows only 1,000 signatures per request, so pagination using the before parameter is required for full history.

// Step 1: Get signatures
const signatures = await connection.getSignaturesForAddress(publicKey, { limit: 1000 });

// Step 2: Get transaction details
const transactions = await Promise.all(
  signatures.map(sig => connection.getParsedTransaction(sig.signature))
);

Comparing Devnet and Mainnet‑beta

Key takeaway: Public endpoints are heavily throttled, often returning 429 Too Many Requests errors.

Lessons Learned

• Commitment Levels – Balancing the speed of a “processed” transaction with the certainty of a “finalized” one is still a learning curve.
• Rate limiting – Expect stricter limits on Mainnet‑beta, especially on shared RPC nodes.

Next Steps

Next week I’ll dive into Programs and explore how to write data back to the chain.

---

If you’re on the same journey, feel free to connect!