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Solmate Blog: Solana Fees, Staking, Tokens and Security
Practical Solana articles without marketing: fees and priority fees, staking across epochs, SPL vs Token-2022, spotting scams and safe self-custody habits.
All articles
- Solana fees explained: 5,000 lamports, priority fees and local fee markets — How Solana fees work: the base 0.000005 SOL per signature, priority fees per compute unit, and why congestion in one app doesn't choke the whole network.
- SPL and Token-2022: how Solana tokens work — Mint accounts, associated token accounts, decimals and Token-2022 extensions: transfer fees, confidentiality and metadata. With real examples from USDC and JUP.
- Solana block explorers: reading transactions in Solscan and SolanaFM — How to verify a transfer, balance and program call in Solscan: confirmed/finalized statuses, balance changes, token transfers and typical reading mistakes.
- Staking SOL: epochs, stake accounts and choosing a validator — How native Solana staking works: activation and deactivation by epochs (2–3 days), inflation rewards of ~6–8% APY, and criteria for choosing a validator.
- Solana rent and accounts: why part of your balance is 'frozen' — The rent-exempt reserve, the minimum account balance (~0.00089 SOL), the token-account reserve (~0.002 SOL), and how to reclaim rent by closing empty accounts.
- Seed phrases: storage that won't let you down — BIP-39, 12 words and 128 bits of entropy: how to write it down, where to keep it, why you must never photograph it, and what a passphrase (the 25th word) is.
- Scams in the Solana ecosystem: seven live schemes dissected — Fake airdrops, NFTs with phishing links, counterfeit tokens, drain approvals and 'support' in your DMs. How to spot them and what to do.
- Solana derivation paths: m/44'/501' and why addresses don't match — BIP-44, coin type 501, and the differences between Phantom, Solflare and Ledger paths. Why one seed phrase yields different addresses and how to find 'yours'.
- Restoring access to a Solana wallet: an honest manual — What can and cannot be recovered: seed phrase, private key, encrypted vault, PIN. Step-by-step scenarios for every kind of loss.
- Solana addresses: base58, Ed25519 and how not to send into the void — The Solana address format: 32 bytes of a public key in base58, 32–44 characters. How wallet, token-account and program addresses differ. Checks before sending.
- Priority fees in practice: when and how much to overpay — How to compute a priority fee via the price per compute unit, where to see the network's current median, and why overpaying won't speed up an ordinary transfer.
- Self-custody without illusions: what you gain and what you lose — A non-custodial wallet through the Solana example: full control and full responsibility. A safe-start checklist and typical beginner mistakes.