About
A field guide to Solana accounts.
What it is
Solana Bytes is an interactive hex visualizer for Solana accounts paired with a Byte Challenge game.
Paste any account address to see decoded metadata and raw bytes with hover tooltips for every field. Play the Challenge to test your knowledge of Solana data structures — find specific fields in hex dumps, build streaks, climb the leaderboard.
Why it exists
Solana’s existing explorers are great for transactions but treat raw account data as an opaque blob. If you want to understand what a Stake account, a Vote account, or a Metaplex Metadata account actually is at the byte level, you read the source.
Solana Bytes is the byte-level guide that we wanted when we were learning — one place to inspect, decode, and practice on the layouts that every Solana developer eventually touches.
Who built it
Built for the Colosseum Frontier Hackathon by Jose Ferrer, creator of SolRengine — an open-source Rails engine for Solana wallet auth, RPC, and account decoding.
Solana Bytes is the reference application that demonstrates the engine end-to-end: wallet sign-in, RPC fetching with retry, per-program account decoding, and a real game loop on top.
Inspired by Solandy’s Learn Solana in 2026 YouTube series — the byte-level walkthrough that made Solana account layouts feel approachable.
Tech stack
- Rails 8.1 · Hotwire (Turbo + Stimulus) · Tailwind v4
- SolRengine · wallet auth (SIWS) + RPC client + account decoders
- SQLite + Solid Queue / Cache / Cable
- Press Start 2P font · inline SVG pixel sprites · pixel-art everywhere
- Kamal for deploys