Solana Foundation Introduces Kora, Enabling Fee-Free Transactions And Custom Fee Tokens

In Brief

Solana Foundation has launched Kora, a secure, flexible fee relayer and signing node that enables gasless transactions, custom fee tokens, and remote signing for the Solana ecosystem.

Solana Foundation, an organization dedicated to supporting the growth, decentralization, security, and adoption of the Solana blockchain, has introduced Kora, a fee relayer and signing node designed for the Solana ecosystem Kora enables fee-free transactions, the use of custom fee tokens, and secure transaction signing, providing a flexible infrastructure for developers.

It was developed to address the lack of modern, standardized solutions for fee sponsorship and remote signing on Solana. It allows full sponsorship of fees, payment in any token including stablecoins, and offloading signing to secure environments such as Turnkey or AWS KMS. The platform supports six remote signers and provides metrics to monitor fund levels.

The solution allows users to conduct gasless transactions, paying fees in tokens such as USDC, BONK, or an application’s native token, while also managing any transaction that requires a trusted signer. It is designed to improve user experience by eliminating the need for SOL, offering revenue control by collecting fees in a variety of tokens, and providing production-ready features including secure validation, rate limiting, and monitoring. Integration is simplified through a JSON-RPC API and TypeScript SDK, and deployment is supported on multiple platforms including Docker and Railway.

Built with Rust and complemented by a TypeScript SDK, Kora supports JSON-RPC 2.0, multiple signer options including Solana private keys and third-party services like Turnkey and Privy, and authentication via API key, HMAC, or none. Its architecture includes configurable validation rules, full Token-2022 support, Redis caching, rate limiting, secure key management, and Prometheus metrics for monitoring. Fee payer protection policies are also enhanced.

Kora Goes Live With Full Audit And Strong Configuration Support

Kora also includes a standard RPC server and CLI for signing transactions and paying fees from a funded wallet using Solana Keychain, a backend-agnostic signing library available for TypeScript and Rust. Solana Keychain supports multiple backends including AWS KMS, Fireblocks, Privy, Turnkey, and HashiCorp, with additional integrations planned.

The system comes with a standard TOML configuration for managing fee payer policies, transaction validation, method controls, program and token allowlists or blocklists, and custom policies Furthermore, Kora has undergone a full audit and differential fuzz testing by Runtime Verification, ensuring a high level of security and reliability.