Slotlight — Solana, through a prism

01spectrum

The spectrum of the last 192 slots.

Each column is one finalized slot, coloured by its leader's wavelength. Black lines are slots a leader skipped — Solana's own Fraunhofer lines. Right of the marker: the schedule for the next few seconds. Click any slot to open its light print.

—finalized ▲ now ▸ scheduled—

—slots produced

—absorption lines (skipped)

—skip rate, this window

—leaders in this window

02you

You, in the light.

Everyone who opens Slotlight gets a wavelength of their own. Tap the prism scene to fire your photon through it — for a moment it travels with the real slots. Then see how your reflexes compare with a Solana slot.

your wavelength

—nm

—

0 photons fired

since you arrived

time here0 s

slots you witnessed0

transactions on Solana0

validators that led0

light travelled0 km

—

beat a slot

your best—

03light print

Find your transaction in the light.

Paste a transaction signature, your wallet or a slot number. We read the whole block from mainnet and draw it: every transaction is a ray — its length is the compute it burned, its colour is the program it called. Yours burns white.

Pick a slot in the spectrum above,
or paste a signature.

04instruments

Live readings.

Measured by the network itself over the last five minutes. Between reads, counters advance at the pace the network just measured.

slot time

—

transactions / sec

—

non-vote, network-wide

finality

—

skip rate

—

share of the last 192 slots with no block

epoch

—

transactions, all time

—

every transaction since genesis

05speed of light

How far light gets in one slot.

— km

In one Solana slot (—), a photon would travel — times around the Earth. The globe on the left replays it every slot, in sync with mainnet.

one Ethereum block · 12 s—

one Bitcoin block · ~10 min—

06last 30 minutes

Slot time, minute by minute.

The dashed line is the original 400 ms design target.

07method

How it works.

i.

One read for everyone

A tiny server function reads mainnet once a second in two batched calls; the CDN shares that snapshot with every visitor. A thousand viewers cost the network the same as one.

ii.

Physics on your GPU

Up to 24,576 photons live in your graphics card. A WebGPU compute shader moves and refracts them every frame — no video, no pre-render. Without WebGPU, the same physics runs on canvas.

iii.

Real blocks, compressed

A light print reads the full block (~2–3 MB) on the server and sends you ~10 KB: compute, fee, result and program of each transaction. A block never changes, so each one is read from Solana once.