Shred Delivery

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What is Helius Shred Delivery?

Shred Delivery is Helius’s pre-execution data product, designed to give you ultra low-latency access to Solana’s transaction data. It ships in two flavors:

• Raw shreds (UDP) — unprocessed shred packets, delivered as they’re produced. You implement the deshredding.
• Preprocessed transactions (gRPC, Public Beta) — decoded shreds. Skips the deshredding step and delivers transactions ~8 ms ahead of the processed commitment level on average.

Either mode offers a competitive edge for propAMMs, snipers, copy traders, liquidation bots, and arbitrage — as well as RPC node operators who want to remove network sync latency. Note: Shreds carry transactions, not account state. Both raw shreds and preprocessed transactions deliver transactions before they execute. Account and program updates (token balances, bonding-curve state, etc.) don’t exist yet at the shred stage — the runtime produces them during execution. If you need real-time account state changes, use LaserStream gRPC at processed commitment instead.

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What are shreds?

In Solana, transactions are broken down into smaller data packets called “shreds” to facilitate efficient and rapid propagation across the network. Each shred is a fragment of transaction data, optimized to fit within standard network packets, ensuring swift distribution and reconstruction into complete blocks by validators. This architecture is pivotal for maintaining Solana’s high throughput and low latency, and Shred Delivery taps directly into this raw data stream before any processing occurs.

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Raw Shreds vs. Preprocessed transactions

Both modes are part of Shred Delivery and both ship pre-execution data — the difference is how much processing Helius does before handing it to you.

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When to choose which

Pick raw shreds when every microsecond matters and you have the infrastructure to deshred at line rate. Pick preprocessed transactions when you want the ~8 ms head-start over processed without having to write deshredding logic — and you don’t need execution metadata. See Preprocessed Transactions for the full data shape, tradeoffs, and SDK examples.

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Shred Delivery vs. LaserStream gRPC

LaserStream gRPC and Shred Delivery sit at different points in the transaction lifecycle: Many teams use both: Shred Delivery for the pre-execution signal that drives a trading decision, and LaserStream gRPC for the post-execution confirmation that updates dashboards and persists state.

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The Helius Validator Advantage

Helius is the top validator by stake weight and receives shreds faster than validators with less stake and non-staked RPC nodes. In Turbine, validators with higher stake weights receive priority in the data propagation tree, meaning block leaders send shreds to high-stake validators like Helius first. This stake-weighted propagation ensures we receive shreds at the earliest possible moment in the network’s data flow. While other providers must wait for secondary propagation or rely on unstaked infrastructure, our validator position grants direct, prioritized access to the raw transaction data as it flows through the network.