Yellowstone gRPC
A high-throughput gRPC streaming protocol for Solana that pushes account updates, slot events, and transactions directly from a validator's Geyser plugin to clients.
In detail
Yellowstone gRPC is the de-facto streaming standard for low-latency Solana data. It runs on top of a validator's Geyser plugin and exposes a bidirectional gRPC server that clients subscribe to with account, program, transaction, and slot filters. Compared to public RPC polling or WebSocket notifications, Yellowstone delivers updates with ~15–50ms lower end-to-end latency because data is pushed server-side the moment the validator processes it. Subglow operates its own Yellowstone cluster colocated near Solana validators and adds server-side filtering and pre-parsed JSON on top so clients don't pay Borsh deserialization cost.
Key points
- Runs on a validator's Geyser plugin, not an indexer
- Bidirectional gRPC with filter-driven subscriptions
- Typically 15–50ms faster than WebSocket or RPC polling
- Originally developed by Triton One, now standard across providers
- Subglow adds filtering + pre-parsing on top of vanilla Yellowstone