Skip to main content

Send a legacy transaction

Solana legacy transactions are the simpler of Solana's two transaction formats. They don't support Address Lookup Tables and are capped at 32 addresses per transaction, but they work well for straightforward operations like transfers.

This guide shows you how to sign and send legacy transactions through MetaMask. See the Solana documentation for more background on Solana transactions.

Prerequisites​

Set up a Solana client and connect to the user's wallet:

import { createSolanaClient } from '@metamask/connect-solana'
import { Connection, Transaction, SystemProgram, PublicKey } from '@solana/web3.js'

const solanaClient = await createSolanaClient({
  dapp: {
    name: 'My Solana DApp',
    url: window.location.origin,
  },
})

const wallet = solanaClient.getWallet()
const { accounts } = await wallet.features['standard:connect'].connect()
const account = accounts[0]

Sign and send a transaction​

After creating an unsigned legacy transaction, use the wallet's solana:signAndSendTransaction feature to ask the user's MetaMask wallet to sign and send it.

The method accepts a serialized transaction as a Uint8Array and returns an object containing the signature.

const connection = new Connection('https://api.devnet.solana.com')
const publicKey = new PublicKey(account.address)

const transaction = new Transaction().add(
  SystemProgram.transfer({
    fromPubkey: publicKey,
    toPubkey: publicKey,
    lamports: 10,
  }),
)

transaction.recentBlockhash = (await connection.getLatestBlockhash()).blockhash
transaction.feePayer = publicKey

const [{ signature }] = await wallet.features['solana:signAndSendTransaction'].signAndSendTransaction({
  account,
  transaction: transaction.serialize({ verifySignatures: false }),
  chain: 'solana:EtWTRABZaYq6iMfeYKouRu166VU2xqa1',
})

await connection.getSignatureStatus(signature)

Sign and send multiple transactions​

To sign and send multiple legacy transactions, call signAndSendTransaction for each transaction:

const transactions = [new Transaction(), new Transaction()]

for (const transaction of transactions) {
  transaction.recentBlockhash = (await connection.getLatestBlockhash()).blockhash
  transaction.feePayer = publicKey

  const [{ signature }] = await wallet.features['solana:signAndSendTransaction'].signAndSendTransaction({
    account,
    transaction: transaction.serialize({ verifySignatures: false }),
    chain: 'solana:EtWTRABZaYq6iMfeYKouRu166VU2xqa1',
  })

  await connection.getSignatureStatus(signature)
}

Next steps​

To efficiently load more addresses in a single transaction, learn how to send a versioned transaction with Address Lookup Tables.

On this page