Solana Week 1, a beginner's perspective

Binayak — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:55:57 +0000

I just started with 100 days of Solana with MLH. The first week was about keypair identification. I have been a developer in the web2 domain for >5 years and finally thought of trying out web3.

If you’ve spent years building in Web2, “identity” probably means a combination of usernames, emails, passwords, and maybe OAuth providers. Users sign up, you store their credentials in a database, and your backend decides what they’re allowed to do.

On Solana, that entire model flips. There are no usernames. No passwords. No “Sign in with Google.”
Instead, identity is just a keypair — and once I understood that, everything else started to make sense.

When you generate an SSH keypair:

- You keep the private key on your machine
- You upload the public key to a server
- The server lets you in only if you can prove you hold the private key

No password needed. No central authority verifying you. Just cryptography.

Solana works almost exactly like this....

Your public key is your address on the network
Your private key proves that you own that address
Instead of one server, the entire Solana network verifies you

That’s your identity.

On Solana, your identity looks more like this:
....mFaf88c8tiVkKz3.....
That string is your public key, encoded in Base58 (a format designed to avoid confusing characters like 0, O, I, and l).

One shift that I found was the trade-offs:

Lose your private key → you lose access permanently
Leak your private key → someone else becomes you
No recovery system unless you build one on top

For a Web2 developer like myself, this feels extreme — because it is. But, you are replacing convenience with true ownership.

DEV Community: Binayak

Solana Week 1, a beginner's perspective