Solana overview | ITS

Send interchain tokens to and from Solana programs, and deploy, register and link tokens on Solana.

On Solana, ITS is the solana-axelar-its program. It connects SPL Token and Token-2022 mints to ITS, sends and receives their transfers through the ITS Hub, and calls Solana programs that receive tokens with data. Concepts explains token IDs, the kinds of token and token managers, which work the same way on Solana.

💡

Using an AI agent?

Copy this page with Copy Markdown at the top and give it to your agent, with the token you want to make interchain. The copied page links to the Markdown of the other pages it refers to, so the agent can read them too. Review what it writes, and test on testnet before mainnet.

Guides

Send & receive interchain transfers: send tokens from your program, and receive tokens with data in it.
Deploy and register tokens: deploy an interchain token, register a canonical token, link a custom token, and manage roles and flow limits.
ITS program reference: accounts, PDAs, instructions and events.

How a transfer works on Solana

From Solana

Your program or wallet → ITS (interchain_transfer) → Gateway → ITS Hub on Axelar → Destination chain

ITS takes the tokens from the sender: it burns them, or locks them in the token manager's token account, depending on the token manager type.
ITS pays the gas from the payer account to the Gas Service, and sends the transfer to the ITS Hub through the Gateway.

To Solana

Source chain → ITS Hub on Axelar → Gateway (approve_message) → ITS (execute) → Your program (execute_with_interchain_token)

Axelar's relayer approves the message on the Gateway, then calls ITS, which checks that the message comes from the ITS Hub and from a trusted source chain.
ITS mints or unlocks the tokens into the recipient's associated token account, and creates the account if it doesn't exist. If the recipient is a program, the account belongs to a PDA of that program, so the program can spend the tokens.
If the transfer carries data, ITS then calls the recipient program with it.

Setup

Add the ITS crate to your program, with the feature for the network you deploy to:

[dependencies]
anchor-lang = "1.2.0"
anchor-spl = "1.2.0"
solana-axelar-its = { version = "1.1.2", default-features = false, features = ["cpi", "mainnet"] }

💡

The network feature (mainnet or testnet) sets the program IDs your program checks against. The crates default to devnet-amplifier, so without default-features = false and a network feature, your program accepts calls only from the devnet programs. Use the same network feature on every Axelar crate. See the GMP setup for the Gateway and Gas Service crates.

ITS on Axelar's testnet runs on Solana's devnet cluster. For the program addresses, see Chains and contracts.

Things to know

Amounts are u64. When a token is deployed to Solana from a chain with larger integers, such as an EVM chain, the ITS Hub gives it at most 6 decimals on Solana, and converts the amounts of transfers between the two chains. See ITS Hub.
Interchain tokens are Token-2022 mints. Those that ITS deploys on Solana have Metaplex metadata, with the name and symbol, that can't be changed later.
Gas is paid in lamports. Pass the fee as gas_value to the ITS instruction: ITS pays the Gas Service itself. Estimate it as in Estimate ITS fees, with solana as the source chain.
Express currently doesn't work for ITS transfers.

Overview