# PDA

> Program-derived address — a Solana account whose address is computed from seeds, owned by a program, with no private key to steal.

A normal Solana account has a keypair; a PDA is derived from program id plus seeds and deliberately falls off the ed25519 curve, so no private key exists. Only the owning program can 'sign' for it — which is how a program holds tokens, vaults and authority without a key anyone could lose or leak.

They double as deterministic storage: the address for 'user profile of wallet X' is computable offline from X, so no registry is needed. The recurring bug class is seed validation — if the program does not check the seeds it was given, it is signing for an account it did not mean to.

## Related terms

- https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/glossary/solana.md
- https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/glossary/anchor-framework.md
- https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/glossary/spl-token.md

---

Source: https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/glossary/pda
DField Solutions — Dunakeszi, Hungary — dezso@dfieldsolutions.com
Booking: see https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/contact