System Overview

Interacting with Atlas should feel nearly identical to interacting with Solana.

The state transitions on Atlas are driven by the Sequencer node. You can think about the Sequencer as Atlas's leader node. The Sequencer will broadcast state changes and new blocks to downstream Replay nodes that will reconstruct the state of the chain. These nodes will compare their internally computed state roots to the roots published to the Sequencer's message stream to verify that their state matches the Sequencer's state.

RPC's are sidecars attached to Replay nodes.

When sending a read request to an Atlas RPC, that server will return data to the user from the RPC's local machine (based on the aformentioned state reconstruction).

When sending a write request (transaction) to an Atlas RPC, that server will forward the request to the sequencer, which will then be scheduled into the Sequencer's execution pipeline.