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Solana Wallet FAQ: Key Storage, Recovery and Transfer Fees
Where Solmate keeps your keys, how to restore access after losing a device, what a SOL transfer costs, how rent works and how to move a wallet over from Phantom.
What is Solmate and how is it different from an exchange?
Solmate is a non-custodial wallet: the private key is generated and stored only in your browser, in encrypted form. On an exchange the exchange holds your coins; here only you do. We can neither freeze, recover, nor spend your SOL.
Where are my keys stored? Do they go to a server?
Keys never leave the browser. Only a vault encrypted with AES-256-GCM is saved to localStorage: the encryption key is derived from your PIN via PBKDF2 with 600,000 iterations. The only external requests are the public Solana RPC node and the price API.
I lost my seed phrase. How do I recover access?
You don't. That's a fundamental property of self-custody: there's no server account, so there's no 'password reset'. If the encrypted vault is still alive in the browser, you can open Backup with your PIN and copy the phrase out. Otherwise access is lost permanently — which is why you write the phrase on paper at creation.
What's the fee for a SOL transfer?
The base fee per signature is 5,000 lamports (0.000005 SOL — fractions of a cent). Under load you can add a priority fee — a surcharge per compute unit. The wallet shows a fee estimate before sending, on the confirmation screen.
How long does a transaction take to confirm?
A Solana slot is about 400 ms. Confirmed status usually arrives within 1–2 seconds; finalized (irreversible) in about 13 seconds (~32 slots). For transfers between people, confirmed is enough.
What's that 44-character address and why no 0x?
A Solana address is an Ed25519 public key in base58 encoding, 32–44 characters. There are no prefixes like 0x. A typo almost always makes the address invalid, but still verify the first and last 4 characters.
What is rent and why does a bit of SOL get 'stuck' on my balance?
Every Solana account (including token accounts for SPL tokens) must hold a minimum balance — the rent-exempt reserve, about 0.002 SOL per token account. Closing an empty token account returns that reserve to you.
Can I import a wallet from Phantom or Solflare?
Yes. Take the seed phrase (12/24 words) from Phantom/Solflare settings and import it on the Import page. Solmate uses the standard path m/44'/501'/0'/0' — the address will match the first account of those wallets. The resulting address and path are shown before saving.
Why is the SOL price sometimes marked as 'stale'?
Quotes come from a public API and are cached for 60 seconds. If the API is unavailable (rate limits, network), the interface shows the last known value with a marker — the wallet keeps working; transaction sending is unaffected.
Do you collect analytics or cookies?
No. Solmate has no Google Analytics, pixels, advertising cookies or third-party trackers. Details are on the Privacy page.