Guide

How to use solana-keygen grind

solana-keygen grind is the Solana CLI's built-in vanity address generator. It's free, it runs on your computer, and it's great up to about four letters. Here are the commands, how long your word will take, and the fix when it's too slow.

The commands

Install the Solana CLI, then grind an address that starts with your word:

solana-keygen grind --starts-with Abc:1

The number after the colon is how many matching keypairs to find. Every other pattern works the same way:

# Ends with "pump"
solana-keygen grind --ends-with pump:1

# Starts with "Abc" and ends with "pump"
solana-keygen grind --starts-and-ends-with Abc:pump:1

# Any capitalization: much faster
solana-keygen grind --starts-with abc:1 --ignore-case

# Pick how many CPU threads to use
solana-keygen grind --starts-with Abc:1 --num-threads 8

Each match lands in the current folder as <ADDRESS>.json, a keypair file. Anyone with that file controls the address, so keep it offline or encrypted. Add --use-mnemonic to get a seed phrase instead, at a big cost in speed.

How long will it take?

Type your word to see how many keys it takes on average and how long your computer needs. Every letter counts, including capitalization.

100,000 keys a second is a rough figure for solana-keygen on a laptop's CPU. Change it to match your machine. Here's how word length plays out at that speed, all starting with a capital A, the fastest kind of start:

Exact capitalization. Exact odds for Solana's address format, from the same math as our quotes.

Why the first letter matters

A Solana address encodes a 32-byte key, and that makes its first character uneven: about 94% of addresses start with a number from 2 to 9 or a capital A to H. Any other first letter only shows up on rare, shorter addresses. So abc takes about 59 times longer to find than Abc, and Wizard takes about 59 times longer than Abcdef, though both have six letters.

The fix: start with a capital A to H, or a number from 2 to 9. With --ignore-case, a lowercase a to h can match its capital, so those take care of themselves.

Letters that never match

Base58 leaves out 0 (zero), O (capital o), I (capital i) and l (lowercase L), so a grind for SOL or Solana with exact capitalization runs forever. With --ignore-case, o, i and l match their other case. A zero never matches.

When grinding it yourself stops making sense

Up to four letters, solana-keygen grind finishes in seconds. Five takes a laptop about half an hour, six takes days, and seven takes months. Two ways past that:

• A GPU grinder. A big graphics card checks keys hundreds of times faster than a CPU. You'll need the card, the drivers and some patience with CUDA.
• Get it from us. Type your word for a fixed price in SOL. We grind on GPUs, deliver the key encrypted to your browser, and your browser checks it matches before showing it to you. Get a wallet address, or a pump.fun CA that you launch right here.

Using your keypair

The Solana CLI reads the .json file as is: solana config set --keypair ./<ADDRESS>.json. Phantom, Solflare and Backpack ask for a base58 private key instead, so convert the file with a script on your own computer, and never paste a key into a website. Orders from us come with both: the base58 key for your wallet app and the .json file for the CLI.

Questions