Introducing Replay:
Solana mainnet, paused on a frame you can drive.
Reproduce the bug at the slot it happened. Stage a program upgrade against today's mainnet accounts. Decide a protocol change with evidence, not a hunch. Replay puts you inside Solana mainnet at any moment you choose and lets you drive it — advance the chain slot by slot, splice your own transactions, patch any account, deploy any program, and read it all back over full JSON-RPC, WebSocket, and Geyser. The closest thing to a time machine for the Solana state machine, drivable from a terminal or from an AI agent over Model Context Protocol.
- published
- May 21, 2026
- author
- k256
- category
- Product launch
- reading time
- 12 min
The Solana developer toolchain has good tools for many problems — and one persistent hole: being mainnet at a specific moment, and driving it forward.
solana-test-validatorboots an empty chain. Devnet and testnet are different chains with different state. Forking RPC proxies handle the reads you've implemented but don't actually run a validator — you can't advance the chain, you can't replay a block, you can't splice your own transaction at slot 418,908,420 and watch what happens next. Account-snapshot tools take a few accounts at a moment, but the bank doesn't tick.
An actual mainnet. An actual moment. That you can drive.
That is the piece that was missing. Not a simulator, not a proxy, not a partial fork — your own Solana mainnet, isolated to you, with no public consensus to keep up with and nobody else on it, that you can advance, mutate, and read like the real thing. Because at the protocol layer, it is the real thing.