Fetch and display recent transactions

The Scenario

Yesterday you read your wallet’s balance from Solana: an account’s balance. But a database isn’t just balances. Every time someone sends SOL, creates a token, or interacts with a program, that action is recorded as a transaction. And just like balances, transaction history is public. Anyone can look up what happened to any address.

In web2 terms, if Day 8 was GET /users/:id/balance, today is GET /users/:id/transactions. Same pattern, richer data.

The Challenge

Using the same project from Day 8, fetch the 5 most recent transaction signatures for a public address on devnet. Display each transaction’s signature, the slot it was confirmed in, and the timestamp.

What You’ll Need

Your Day 8 project folder with @solana/kit already installed
A terminal
A code editor

Steps

In your Day 8 project folder, create a new file called fetch-transactions.mjs:

import { createSolanaRpc, devnet, address } from "@solana/kit";

const rpc = createSolanaRpc(devnet("https://api.devnet.solana.com"));

// Same address from yesterday. Programs have lots of transaction activity.
const targetAddress = address(
  "TokenzQdBNbLqP5VEhdkAS6EPFLC1PHnBqCXEpPxuEb"
);

// Fetch the 5 most recent transaction signatures for this address
const signatures = await rpc
  .getSignaturesForAddress(targetAddress, { limit: 5 })
  .send();

console.log(
  `\nLast 5 transactions for ${targetAddress}:\n`
);

for (const tx of signatures) {
  const time = tx.blockTime
    ? new Date(Number(tx.blockTime) * 1000).toLocaleString()
    : "unknown";

  console.log(`Signature : ${tx.signature}`);
  console.log(`Slot      : ${tx.slot}`);
  console.log(`Time      : ${time}`);
  console.log(`Status    : ${tx.err ? "Failed" : "Success"}`);
  console.log("---");
}

Run It

node fetch-transactions.mjs

You should see 5 transactions printed to your terminal, each with a signature, slot number, timestamp, and status.

What Just Happened

You called getSignaturesForAddress, one of Solana’s RPC methods for reading transaction history. It returns a list of transaction signatures (unique identifiers for each transaction), ordered from newest to oldest.

A few things to notice:

Transaction signatures are long base-58 strings. They work like transaction IDs. You can paste any signature into Solana Explorer to see the full details of that transaction: who signed it, what instructions it contained, which accounts it touched.

The slot is a sequence number. Solana processes transactions in batches, and each batch gets assigned a slot number. Think of it like an auto-incrementing ID on a database row. Higher slot numbers mean more recent activity. Solana assigns new slot numbers roughly every 400 milliseconds, so the network moves fast.

The blockTime is a Unix timestamp (seconds since January 1, 1970), which is the same format you’d get from Date.now() / 1000 in JavaScript. The code converts it to a human-readable date. Some older transactions may not have a blockTime, which is why the code handles that case.

You queried the Token-2022 program address again. Since other accounts interact with it constantly, it has a steady stream of transaction activity, which makes it a good target for this exercise. Try swapping in a different address from Solana Explorer and see what comes back.

Resources

Submission

Share a screenshot or paste of your terminal output showing the 5 transactions with their signatures, slots, timestamps, and statuses.