Glossary / Solana Core

Program Derived Address (PDA)

A special Solana address derived from a program ID and seeds — deterministic, no private key, controlled by the owning program.

A Program Derived Address is a Solana address computed from a program ID and a set of seeds. It has no matching private key, so only the owning program can sign transactions from it. PDAs are how Solana programs hold funds and state without requiring a human signer.

You will encounter PDAs everywhere: Metaplex metadata accounts, Raydium pool state, escrow accounts, staking vaults, and more. They are the backbone of composable Solana DeFi.

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