Where Ethereum writes a new contract per token, Solana ships one canonical token program: mints define the token, token accounts hold balances, and every wallet already knows how to display them. New token? Create a mint, not a program.
The operational detail that surprises people: balances live in per-user token accounts derived from mint plus owner — 'does this wallet hold token X' is an account lookup, and sending to a wallet that has never held X means creating its token account first. Extensions (interest-bearing, transfer hooks) keep extending the same program rather than forking it.
Related terms
Solana
A high-throughput, low-fee blockchain — thousands of transactions a second at fractions of a cent — built for applications that need speed.
PDA
Program-derived address — a Solana account whose address is computed from seeds, owned by a program, with no private key to steal.
Crypto wallet
The thing that holds your keys, not your coins — signs transactions to prove 'it was me' without ever showing the private key.
The bench this belongs to
BlockchainSolidity on Ethereum, Polygon, Base and Arbitrum. Anchor programs on Solana. Written with tests first, because a redeploy is not a hotfix once value is on the line.
