Guide

Solana Address Example: What a Wallet Address Looks Like

A Solana address is a string of 32 to 44 letters and numbers, usually 44, with no prefix. Here are two real ones of ours, what each part means, and a reader that checks any address, and any word, right in your browser.

Both are ordinary Solana addresses. Paste either into an explorer and it opens: the burn wallet with every burn it has made, and $NTRNDM as a coin. Neither has a 0x in front or a checksum on the end, the way Ethereum and Bitcoin addresses do. Every character is part of the key.

Keypair, public key, address

A Solana wallet starts with a keypair. Your wallet picks a random 32-byte private key, and the 32-byte public key follows from it by the math of Ed25519, the signature scheme Solana uses. The address is that public key, written in base58 so people can read it and copy it. On Solana, "public key" and "address" mean the same thing.

The math only runs one way. From a private key, anyone gets the address in a moment. From an address, nobody can get the key back. So nobody picks an address and works back to its key: a wallet makes the key first, and the address is whatever comes out. solana-keygen saves a keypair as a .json file of 64 numbers: the 32-byte private key, then the 32-byte public key.

That one-way math is why a vanity address takes a search. To get an address that starts with your word, you try random keys until one fits. Here's how grinding works.

Why 32 to 44 characters

A public key is a 32-byte number, and base58 writes it in digits of 58. The biggest 32-byte numbers need 44 digits, and smaller ones need fewer. Because each leading zero byte becomes a single 1, the shortest possible address is 32 ones in a row.

We counted every 32-byte value by the length it encodes to. Here's how random addresses split:

Exact shares of all 2²⁵⁶ 32-byte values. Real addresses are random keys, so they split the same way.

So a 43-character address is normal, and nothing's missing. It's also why $NTRNDM's CA is 43: only 43-character addresses start with an N, about 1 address in 1,000.

The base58 alphabet

Base58 is the 62 letters and numbers, minus four that people mix up. These are all the characters a Solana address can use:

123456789 ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz

• No 0 (zero), which looks like O.
• No O (capital o), which looks like 0.
• No I (capital i), which looks like l.
• No l (lowercase L), which looks like I.

Base58 is case-sensitive. A and a are different characters, so change the case of one letter and you have a different address. Copy and paste an address, never retype it.

Read any Solana address

Paste an address, or try an example. The reader checks every character against base58, counts the length, and decodes it to see that it's 32 bytes, the way a wallet does before it sends. It all runs in your browser, and nothing you paste leaves the page.

A valid format is all any reader can promise. Try the typo: one digit in the middle changed, and it still decodes to 32 bytes. It's a different, valid address, which is why you paste addresses instead of typing them. For coins, the CA reader also compares a CA with the one a project posted, character by character.

Which words fit in a Solana address

Any word made of base58 characters can start an address. Two rules decide whether yours can:

• No zeros, ever. w0w can't appear in any address. Spell it wow.
• With exact capitalization, no O, I or l. Sol never appears with that lowercase L. Let any capitalization match, and SOL, sOl or sol, whichever case base58 has, all count.

Then it's a question of how many keys the search takes. Each extra letter is about 58 times rarer with exact capitalization, or about 29 times with any. The first letter matters most: most addresses start with 1 to 9 or A to H, so Degen takes about 192 million keys and degen about 11.3 billion. Type a word to see whether it fits and what it takes:

Average keys for an address that starts with the word, from the same math as our quotes.

We grind on GPUs, so you don't have to leave a laptop running for days, and the vanity address page shows your word's price in SOL as you type. A short word is quick on your own computer: here's how to use solana-keygen grind.

Wallet address, coin address, token account

Every account on Solana has an address in the same format, so the format alone won't tell you what's behind it.

• A wallet address is a public key with a private key behind it. It holds SOL, and it's the address you give people to pay you. Like our burn wallet above.
• A coin address, the CA or mint address, is the coin itself. Nobody holds SOL there, and SOL sent to it is in most cases gone. Like $NTRNDM's above. More in what a CA is.
• A token account holds one coin for one wallet. Your wallet makes it the first time you get that coin. You never hand it out: people send coins to your wallet address, and their wallet finds the token account.

Check an address before you send

Wallets shorten addresses to their first and last four characters, and that's what scammers copy. In address poisoning, an attacker makes an address with the same ends as one you use and sends you a tiny transfer, so the fake sits in your history. Copy addresses from your contacts or the source, never from your history, and compare a chunk of the middle too. Here's how address poisoning works, and what a fake costs.

A word helps. Four random characters are hard to remember, but a word you chose is easy to check in full, and a fake has to match all of it. That's how a word in a coin's CA stops vamps, too.

Questions