In the context of Solana, a “Lamport” is the smallest unit of the native cryptocurrency SOL, much like a satoshi in the Bitcoin network. It’s named after Leslie Lamport, a renowned computer scientist known for his work in distributed systems and as the creator of the LaTeX document preparation system.
Solana is designed to support very high throughput and low transaction costs while maintaining decentralization. To facilitate this, transactions and balances on the Solana network can involve very small amounts of SOL, so there’s a need for a unit smaller than a SOL for precision. Here’s the breakdown:
1 SOL = 1,000,000,000 Lamports
When dealing with Solana’s cryptocurrency, most transactions are denominated in SOL for practicality, but the underlying system handles these in Lamports for accuracy and to allow for microtransactions. This is similar to how many other cryptocurrencies have smaller denominations for their tokens to allow for greater precision in transactions.