Entering Into the Web3 World...

Divyansh Pingle 👾 — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 18:51:55 +0000

Think about how many identities you have right now. A GitHub username. A work email. An AWS IAM user. A phone number tied to your bank. Each one lives in a different company's database, each company controls it, and none of them know about each other unless someone builds an integration.

I'm a week into MLH's #100DaysOfSolana, and the idea that changed how I think about all of this is simple: on Solana, your identity starts with one keypair, and everything you do on-chain is tied to it.

It's basically an SSH key

If you've ever set up SSH, you already understand most of this. You generate a key pair, put the public key on a server, and from then on you prove who you are by holding the private key. No password typed, no account looked up. Just math.

Solana works the same way, except the "server" is the entire network. On Day 1 of the challenge I generated a keypair, and that was it: I had an identity. No sign-up form, no email verification. I airdropped some devnet SOL to the public key, and the network accepted that it belonged to me, because only I hold the matching private key.

Public key = your address. Share it freely, like a public SSH key.
Private key = your proof of ownership. Never share it, like ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.

Fun fact: Solana even uses the same family of cryptography. Addresses are Ed25519 public keys, the same algorithm a lot of us already use for SSH.

An address is not a username

A Solana address looks like this:

14grJpemFaf88c8tiVb77W7TYg2W3ir6pfkKz3YjhhZ5

That's a 32-byte public key encoded in Base58. Base58 is a deliberate choice: it drops characters that are easy to confuse, like 0, O, I, and l, so you're less likely to misread or mistype an address.

The bigger difference is where it comes from. A username is a row in someone else's database. They assigned it, they can rename it, and they can delete it. A Solana address isn't assigned by anyone; it's derived from a key you generated yourself. Nobody had to approve it, and nobody can take it back.

Ownership vs. access someone gave you

This is the part that really clicked for me, coming from AWS labs.

In AWS, your IAM user exists because an admin created it. That admin can attach policies, rotate your credentials, or disable you entirely. You "own" your account only as long as the company that stores it says you do.

On Solana, only the holder of the private key can sign transactions for an account. There's no admin panel and no support ticket that overrides that.

That's powerful, and it cuts both ways:

Nobody can lock you out. Not a platform, not an admin.
Nobody can let you back in. There's no "Forgot password?" link. Lose the private key, and you lose the account.

Web2 trades some control for convenience and recovery. Solana hands you full control, along with full responsibility.

Why this matters beyond logins

On-chain identity isn't just a fancier username. The same keypair is the foundation for:

Owning tokens: balances belong to your address.
Using programs (apps): you sign each action yourself.
Governance and reputation: your history is public and tied to your key.

And because it's cryptographic and self-custodied, it works across every app on the network without anyone's permission. That's what a browser wallet like the one I connected on Day 4 is really doing: holding your keys and signing on your behalf when an app asks. The app never gets your private key; it just gets a signature.

The one-line version

In Web2, companies hand you an identity and keep the keys. On Solana, you generate the keys, and the identity follows.

If you're a Web2 dev curious about Solana, start the way I did: generate a keypair, airdrop yourself some devnet SOL, and look up your own address. It's the fastest way to make this click.