Lesson 04 · Unit 4 · Solana
Fees and priority
Every transaction pays a base fee — 5,000 lamports per signature, a fraction of a cent. That buys inclusion, not position. When a hot token launches and thousands of transactions fight for the same blocks, you can add a priority fee: a tip that moves you up the queue.
Lamport
Base fee
Priority fee
Compute units
What a swap costs, by moment
measured in SOL, approx.
0.00001
Quiet day
0.0002
Busy hour
0.01
Hyped launch
The fee spike is a signal
When your wallet suggests a priority fee hundreds of times normal, it is telling you the token you are about to buy is in a feeding frenzy — the exact moment snipers and bundlers (chapter 7) do their best work. The fee is information; read it.
Where this goes next
A priority fee buys a better place in the leader's queue. It does not broadcast your trade — Solana has no public pool of pending transactions — but the validator building the block does see it, and that is where front-running gets its opening.