Solana Foundation unveils Kora relayer to simplify app onboarding and fee costs

Solana developers and businesses are getting a new tool as the Kora fee relayer promises to streamline how users experience transaction costs on the network.

Solana Foundation introduces Kora for seamless fees and signing

The Solana Foundation this week unveiled Kora, a new fee relayer and signing node designed to make Solana apps easier to use, safer to operate, and more flexible for builders. Moreover, it directly targets long-standing pain points around who pays transaction fees, how they are paid, and where signing occurs.

For beginners, transaction fees are the small costs paid to process an action on a blockchain like Solana. For more advanced builders, managing those fees at scale can quickly become complex and operationally heavy. Kora aims to remove that friction by standardizing fee payment and remote signing practices.

Making transaction fees invisible to end users

With Kora, apps can fully sponsor transaction costs so users can interact with a Solana application without holding any SOL at all. However, fees do not disappear; they can instead be paid by the app in any token, including stablecoins such as USDC, changing the traditional requirement that users first buy a network-native asset simply to begin using a service.

The Solana Foundation explained that Kora was created because there was no modern, standard way to handle fee sponsorship and remote transaction signing, even though Solana’s account model already made such patterns technically possible. Kora now fills that gap as a ready-to-use solution for teams that want predictable infrastructure.

A concrete example comes from solana game onboarding. Imagine a gaming app that wants new players to start immediately on-chain. With Kora, the game can pay transaction fees on behalf of its users and even charge those costs in an in-game token. Players never see a wallet popup requesting SOL, so the flow feels closer to a regular web or mobile app.

Kora provides a standard RPC server and a CLI to sign and pay fees from a topped-up wallet using Solana Keychain. That said, this setup lets teams manage balances centrally while still integrating with existing Solana infrastructure and security practices.

This design lines up with a broader industry trend. According to Electric Capital, developer activity across crypto is increasingly focused on user experience instead of only raw performance metrics. In that context, transaction fee abstraction has emerged as a critical pillar for mainstream-ready applications.

Stronger security for signing and operational controls

Beyond fees, Kora addresses how transactions are signed. Signing is the process of approving a transaction with a private key, which historically often sat on local servers. With Kora, teams can shift those signing operations into secure environments like AWS KMS or other hosted key management services, reducing direct key exposure.

In fact, the kora fee relayer supports six remote signers and exposes metrics that warn teams when funds are running low. Moreover, this observability helps operations teams avoid failed user actions due to depleted wallets, which can be especially important in consumer-facing apps and exchanges.

For developers, Kora ships with a standard RPC server, a command line utility, and a straightforward configuration file. Teams can specify which programs or user accounts are allowed, validate incoming transactions, define fee rules for different token standards, and implement custom policy logic suited to their business model.

Security was also a focus. The Solana Foundation noted that Runtime Verification fully audited and tested Kora, adding an extra layer of assurance for enterprises and protocols that want to rely on it for production workloads. However, teams are still expected to integrate Kora into their own security and monitoring stacks.

Outlook for user-friendly Solana apps

By combining fee sponsorship, flexible payment in assets like fees paid in USDC, and hardened aws kms signing options, Kora aims to make Solana applications feel more like mainstream digital products. Moreover, it offers a path for businesses to abstract away blockchain complexity while retaining the benefits of a high-performance network.

In summary, Kora gives Solana builders a standardized way to pay fees, manage signing, and enforce granular policies, potentially lowering barriers to entry for millions of new users.