Exchange deposit tags
Many custodians reuse one hot address and ask users to add a deposit memo. You'll see thousands of DEPOSIT:… style tags — evidence of how shared deposit addresses are reconciled.
Excavation site · Solana mainnet
Every memo is a
carving left in the chain.
Memostone digs up the newest notes written through Solana's Memo program — deposit tags, payment references, bot heartbeats and the occasional human sentence — and sets each one in stone so you can read the sediment of a living ledger.
- Current slot
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- Memos in last dig
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- Readable sentences
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I
The memo wall
Pick a site to excavate. The Memo programs show everyone's memos; a wallet or program address shows only memos attached to transactions that touched it.
Unmoderated inscriptions. Memos are written by anyone who pays a transaction fee. Memostone shows them as plain text exactly as stored — it never turns them into links and does not vet, endorse or verify anything they say. Treat URLs, offers, "airdrops" and instructions in memos as untrusted.
Choose a site above — the dig starts automatically.
II
Method of excavation
Four steps, all done in your browser against a public Solana RPC. No keys, no servers of our own, nothing stored.
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Choose the site
Every Solana transaction lists the accounts it touched. The Memo program is one of them whenever someone writes a memo, so its address is the richest dig site on the chain.
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Lift the signatures
getSignaturesForAddressreturns up to 1,000 recent transaction signatures per call, newest first — and each comes with its memo already decoded by the validator. -
Sort the strata
Each memo is classified by shape: readable words, structured data (JSON), references and codes, or long hashes. Repeats are folded so one bot can't bury the wall.
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Examine a stone
Open any stone to fetch the full transaction: who paid the fee, the slot, compute used and whether it succeeded — the context around the carving.
III
What the stones tell you
Memos are the closest thing Solana has to marginalia. Here's what people actually read them for.
Payment references
Checkout tools and payroll services stamp invoice IDs and UUIDs into memos so accountants can match an on-chain transfer to an off-chain order.
Infrastructure heartbeats
RPC providers and validators send tiny memo transactions tagged with a region or slot number to measure how fast transactions land. They form the steady background hum of the wall.
Proofs & timestamps
A hash in a memo is a cheap, public "this existed by slot N" receipt. Projects anchor document hashes, game results and audit logs this way.
Your own audit trail
Paste your own wallet to see every memo attached to your recent transactions — useful when you tagged payments and want them back.
Spotting spam
Scam "airdrop" notices often ride along on dust transfers as memos. Seeing them in bulk is a good lesson: a memo proves only that someone paid a fee to write it.
IV
Field guide to the Memo program
A short, accurate primer for reading what you dig up.
What the program does
The SPL Memo program is one of the simplest programs on Solana. An instruction sent to it carries a blob of bytes; the program checks that the bytes are valid UTF-8 text and writes them to the transaction log as Memo (len N): "…". It stores nothing in any account and moves no funds. Because the text sits inside a confirmed transaction, it is replicated by every node that keeps that history and cannot be edited afterwards.
v1 and v2
Two deployments exist. The original, Memo1UhkJRfHyvLMcVucJwxXeuD728EqVDDwQDxFMNo, only validates and logs text. The current one, MemoSq4gqABAXKb96qnH8TysNcWxMyWCqXgDLGmfcHr, adds signer checks: any accounts passed to the instruction must have signed the transaction, so a memo can be provably attributed to the keys that signed it. Most wallets and SDKs use v2 today.
How big can a memo be?
There is no separate cap inside the program, but a whole Solana transaction must fit in 1,232 bytes, shared with signatures, account keys and other instructions. In practice memos run from a couple of bytes to a few hundred. Longer memos also cost more compute, because validating and logging scales with length.
Reading the memo field
RPC nodes expose memos in two places. In getSignaturesForAddress results, a memo field holds every memo in that transaction joined together, each prefixed with its byte length — for example [24] DEPOSIT:a884c64d08e9970d, or several separated by semicolons. In a full getTransaction response with jsonParsed encoding, the instruction shows up with program: "spl-memo" and the text in parsed.
Memos and token transfers
Token-2022 has a "required memo on transfer" extension: an account owner can insist that incoming transfers carry a memo instruction right before them, which is how some regulated or exchange accounts enforce reference tags at the protocol level.
| Stratum | Rule of thumb | Typical source |
|---|---|---|
| Words | Two or more words of letters separated by spaces | People, games, notices |
| Data | Valid JSON object or array | Apps, checkouts |
| References | IDs, UUIDs, short codes, tags | Exchanges, payroll, bots |
| Hashes | 32+ hex chars or long base64 | Proof anchoring |
Classification is a heuristic based on the text's shape only — it is a reading aid, not a verdict.
V
Questions from the trench
Who writes these memos?
Anyone. Any wallet can attach a memo to a transaction for the price of a normal fee. Memostone does not know who the person behind a key is; it can only show the fee payer and signers of the transaction.
Why are so many memos unreadable codes?
Most memo traffic is machine-to-machine: exchange deposit tags, order references, latency probes. Use the Words filter and "Fold repeats" to surface the rarer human sentences.
Is anything here moderated or verified?
No. Memos are user-written and unmoderated. Memostone renders them as plain text only and never makes links clickable, but the words themselves can be false, offensive or a scam. Never act on instructions found in a memo.
Can a memo be deleted or edited?
No. Once a transaction is confirmed its memo is part of the ledger. RPC providers may stop serving very old history, but the data is not changed.
Why does "Dig one layer deeper" stop after a while?
Each layer is 1,000 signatures from a shared public RPC. To be a good neighbour, Memostone limits a session to five layers per site — enough to cover the last few seconds to minutes of busy Memo-program traffic.
How do I write my own memo?
Many wallets have a "memo" field when sending, and every Solana SDK can add a memo instruction. Memostone is read-only and will never ask you to sign or send anything.
Does Memostone track me?
No accounts, no cookies, no analytics. Requests go straight from your browser to the public RPC; addresses you type are sent only to that RPC as part of the query.
Limits & honesty
- Recent only. Each dig returns the newest 1,000 signatures for an address; deeper layers are capped at five per site. This is a window, not an archive.
- Memo field as reported. Text comes from the RPC's decoded
memofield. Byte-length prefixes are stripped; control and direction-override characters are removed for safety. - Truncated for display. Stones show up to 220 characters; field notes show up to 1,200.
- Heuristic strata. Words / Data / References / Hashes is a shape-based guess.
- Shared infrastructure. Data comes from the public node at solana-rpc.publicnode.com. Live watch polls no faster than every 15 seconds; if the node rate-limits, you'll see a retry button.
- Unmoderated content. Nothing on the wall is written, checked or endorsed by Memostone.