Solana Program Streams: every program, every instruction, as-is

A Program Stream is a real-time, persistent connection over which our edge pushes you every instruction, account write, and emitted event from a specific Solana program. Simple contract: you pick a topic in the format solana.<program>.<instruction>, the server subscribes you to that single per-instruction firehose, and the payload arrives in its original shape.

The standard JSON-RPC logsSubscribe method does something similar over a single WebSocket. It works for prototypes. It also ships text JSON over one TCP connection, which caps practical throughput in the low hundreds of messages per second. A busy program (Raydium, Pump.fun) easily exceeds that, and the result is dropped messages or thrashed connections. JSON parsing alone burns more CPU than the actual work in many bots.

Program Streams ride a Yellowstone-grade gRPC transport with binary framing and HTTP/2 multiplexing, the protocol that powers every modern Solana stream provider. The rest of this page is about how those streams are produced, when to pick Program Streams over Enhanced, and how to map our 1,074 topics to the workload you actually have.

Solana's data plane has four layers, ordered roughly by latency. Knowing which layer you're consuming clarifies what to expect from any vendor pitch.

For 99% of teams, Yellowstone gRPC is the right answer. Fast enough for everything short of the latency-arms-race tier of MEV. Mature ecosystem of clients, parsers, and vendor tooling. The other layers exist for specific edges. Pubsub for tinkering. Geyser when you need to colocate your indexer with the validator. Shreds when those last 10ms decide whether your trade lands first.

Yellowstone gRPC delivers binary transactions and account writes. A raw stream stops there. Your client receives the bytes, looks up the program's IDL, matches the 8-byte discriminator at the start of each instruction's data field, and routes to a typed handler. Loading the IDL is a one-time cost; maintaining decoders for ten programs is a real engineering project.

A parsed stream does that decoding server-side. You receive a typed { type: "Swap", mintIn, mintOut, amountIn, amountOut, … } object instead of a buffer. For one program you might not care. The moment you stream Raydium + Orca + Meteora + Pump.fun + System Program, parsing yourself becomes a project. We ship parsed for 40+ programs out of the box: every major DEX, launchpad, lending market, perps program, and infrastructure program.

Filter design also matters. The native accountInclude on the gRPC subscription request keeps your bandwidth tight. Subscribe only to the programs you want and the server drops everything else before it crosses the wire. For finer cuts (“only buys” or “only pool creates”), apply a discriminator side-filter client-side once you receive the parsed event.

Every modern Solana streaming provider implements Yellowstone gRPC on the wire. The protocol is open and the client code is the same. Differences sit one layer above: regions, replay, parsing, pricing, program coverage.

Pick by workload. Migrating from existing Yellowstone code without an op-cost change goes to Triton. Need a managed product with strong dashboards goes to Helius. Already inside the QuickNode ecosystem stays on QuickNode. Want flat pricing and parsed events for the full Solana DEX and launchpad suite, that's us. Same protocol underneath; the bill at the end of the month differs significantly.