Versioned Transactions on Solana Mainnet

Here's everything you need to know to prepare for the upcoming Solana Mainnet feature activation and how to avoid errors once it occurs.

The Solana Foundation estimates that on Monday, October 10, 2022, at the beginning of epoch 358, a feature activation will occur, enabling Versioned Transactions — "the new transaction format that allows for additional functionality in the Solana runtime, including Address Lookup Tables."

Avoid Issues from Versioned Transactions Update

This activation can potentially raise exceptions in your code and affect production.

The following methods are affected by this change:

• getTransaction
• getBlock

To avoid potential issues, you'll need to adapt your code to add a new parameter, otherwise, it might return an error when running some methods. If there's no change, you will get errors when requesting blocks that have those new versioned transactions

Add this Parameter to your getBlock and getTransaction Requests

The request would need to have the following additional parameter:
maxSupportedTransactionVersion: 0

For example:

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "id": 1,
  "method": "getBlock",
  "params": [
    94101948,
    {
      "encoding": "json",
      "maxSupportedTransactionVersion": 0,
      "transactionDetails": "full",
      "rewards": false
    }
  ]
}

In case this new parameter is not explicitly added in the request, maxSupportedTransactionVersion will default to legacy, so any block containing a versioned transaction of version 0 or higher will be answered with an error by the client.

Our documentation for these methods has been updated to reflect the new requirements with examples of multiple languages and libraries:

• getTransaction
• getBlock

We also recommend requesting getBlock with jsonParsed encoding, which would translate the looked-up addresses for versioned transactions into the addresses we are used to seeing right now in the pre/postBalances fields.

For more details on how to prepare and integrate these changes into your code, we recommend checking the following resources:

• Solana Documentation — Versioned Transaction Migration
• Solana Documentation — Versioned Transactions
• Solana Documentation — JSON RPC API - getBlock
• Solana Documentation — JSON RPC API - getTransaction
• Twitter Update from the Solana Developers account

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