After two weeks building on Solana, I feel like my mental model of “blockchain” has completely changed. Before this, I used to think blockchain data was something abstract, complex, and hard to access. Something like a black box where transactions go in, and magic comes out. Reality? It’s surprisingly simple… and surprisingly different. 🧱 What I Expected vs Reality Coming from a fullstack background (PHP, Go, APIs, databases), I expected: Tables Queries (SELECT, JOIN, WHERE) Structured schemas But on Solana, there are no tables. Instead: Accounts = your data Programs = your logic RPC = your API At first, this felt strange. But once I reframed it like this: Solana = a giant public database you can read from Things started to make sense. ⸻ ⚡ The Moment It Clicked The biggest “aha” moment came when I fetched: Balance of an address Recent transactions Using just an RPC call. No authentication. No backend. No database setup. Just: const balance = await rpc . getBalance ( address ).…