Solana launches Kora, opening a new standard for fee-free transactions and remote signing.

The Solana Foundation has just introduced Kora, a fee relayer and signing node specifically designed for the Solana ecosystem, aimed at solving the problem of funding transaction fees and remote signing in a more standard and modern way. The project has completed a security audit by Risc Zero (rv_inc), marking Kora's readiness for deployment in a production environment.

According to the Solana Foundation, Kora was built because there was previously no “off-the-shelf” solution that uniformly supported fee sponsorship and remote signing, even though Solana's account model is very conducive to this. Kora was created to fill that gap.

Kora opens up many notable features for developers and businesses, including the ability to fully fund transaction fees for users, allowing fee payments in any token ( including stablecoins ), as well as shifting transaction signing to high-security environments such as Turnkey or AWS KMS. The system currently supports 6 different types of remote signers, along with a tracking index to alert when the fee-paying wallet balance is about to run low.

Technically, Kora provides a standard RPC server and CLI, allowing transaction signing and fee payment directly from a pre-loaded wallet via Solana Keychain. This is a flexible signing library, independent of the backend, supporting TypeScript and Rust, recently introduced by the Solana development team.

In addition, Kora also comes with a standard TOML configuration file, allowing for deep customization of policies such as: fee payer regulations for Tokenkeg and Token22, transaction authentication, enabling/disabling specific methods, blocklist/allowlist by program, token, or user, as well as other custom policies. This makes Kora suitable for a variety of application models, from wallets and dApps to large-scale backend infrastructure.

With Kora, the Solana Foundation hopes to simplify the end-user experience through fee-free or flexible fee transactions, while providing developers with a new infrastructure standard to build more user-friendly Web3 applications on Solana.