If you’ve spent years building in Web2, identity probably feels straightforward: users sign up with an email, set a password, and your backend stores their credentials. Every app has its own system, and identity is fragmented across services. Solana flips that model completely. Instead of usernames and passwords, identity starts with a keypair — a cryptographic pair of keys generated locally. The public key is your address (visible to everyone) , and the private key is your proof of ownership. There’s no central server, no account creation endpoint, and no password reset flow. If you hold the private key, you are the account. The SSH key analogy (your mental bridge) If you’ve used SSH, you already understand this. You generate a keypair on your machine, place the public key on a server, and prove your identity by signing with your private key. Solana works the same way — except the “server” is the entire network. That one keypair becomes your identity everywhere: across apps, tokens, and programs.…