When you think of the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) space, a few projects immediately pop up in your mind. These are projects that have shown great promise when they started out and have now amassed a huge following of crypto enthusiasts. These are projects that have delivered what they initially set out to deliver and are still innovating.
One such project is the fast, secure, and censorship-resistant Solana blockchain. But that isn’t what we’re going to talk about today. In this article, we would be talking about one of the products built on the Solana blockchain, the Sollet Wallet.
Before we talk about the particulars of the Sollet Wallet, let us quickly take a look at everything that you’ll find in the article.
- What is the Sollet Wallet?
- How to set up the Sollet Wallet?
- How to use the Sollet Wallet?
- How to restore an existing Sollet Wallet?
- What is the SOL token?
With that out of the way, it’s time to talk about the Sollet Wallet!
What is the Sollet Wallet?
Sollet is a non-custodial web-based software wallet created by the Project Serum team to help users manage their Solana and SPL tokens. It also has a browser extension that enables users to manage their assets safely on the Solana blockchain.
The uses of Sollet are not limited to just sending and receiving funds. The software wallet also allows users to connect and interact with the various decentralized applications (DApps) that are present on the Solana blockchain. And it does that in a safe and secure manner.
How to set up the Sollet Wallet?
The process of setting your Sollet wallet up is quite an easy one. In fact, it takes just a few minutes to create a new wallet and start using it. So how do you do it?
To begin with, head over to the Sollet wallet website, sollet.io. When you land on the website, you would be met with a screen similar to the one you can see in the screenshot below.
On this screen, you’ll find a box titled “seed words” and you might wonder what those are. Seed words or seed phrases or mnemonic codes are collections of words that allow you to access your crypto wallet.
In the early days of blockchain technology, you had to write down a list of letters and numbers while creating crypto wallets. And these lists used to be pretty large. However, things have changed now and you can get by with as few as 12 words.
Sollet, however, gives you 24 words that you must keep in a safe place (ideally, in multiple safe places).
Once you’ve stored the seed words safely, you need to click on the tick box toward the end (the one next to the phrase “I have saved these words in a safe place.”) and click on Continue.
When you click on Continue, a popup such as the one shown in the image below would appear, asking you to re-enter your seed phrase as a measure to check whether you have the seed phrase secured safely.
Enter the seed phrase and click on Continue to proceed further. You would then be taken to a screen asking you to pick a password for protecting your wallet. Now, you can choose to either enter a password as asked or skip the step altogether and jump right into the wallet.
I see no harm in filling up a password and would recommend you to do the same. As always, follow the safety steps to ensuring your password is unique and largely unpredictable.
If you do choose to set a password, you shouldn’t discard the seed words thinking your password should do the trick. While the password makes things easier and secure, you would still need your seed phrase every time you need to restore your wallet.
As a final step, click on Create Wallet to create the wallet. And voila! Your wallet has been created and is ready for you to use.
The logical question you must now have is: how do I use the wallet? And to answer that, we have the next section.
How to use the Sollet Wallet?
Since you’re using the wallet for the first time, perhaps the most important thing to do to use the wallet properly is to transfer some tokens to it. But to put some tokens into your wallet, you need to know the address of your wallet. And to find that out, all you need to do is click on the Receive button appearing on your screen.
Upon doing so, a window such as the one in the image below would appear. You can now either copy the address or click on the QR button to generate a QR code for your wallet.
And now that you have the deposit address of your crypto wallet, you can send however many tokens you wish to. As you can see in the image above, this was the process of adding SOL tokens.
What if you had ETH tokens instead? Sollet allows you to convert your ETH into SOL tokens using MetaMask. While that might not be of much use to someone who already has SOL tokens, for someone who only has ETH tokens on their MetaMask wallet, this saves quite a lot of GAS.
Pretty easy, right? What if I told you that sending is just as easy?
To send SOL to someone, all you need to do is enter the recipient’s wallet address and the amount of SOL tokens you wish to transfer. If you want to transfer all of your SOL tokens to the other wallet, a simple way to do so is by clicking on “MAX”.
Once you have entered the correct wallet address as well as the amount of tokens you intend to transfer, all there’s left is to hit the send button and your tokens would be on their way to the recipient’s wallet.
As you can see, using the Sollet Wallet is just as easy as setting it up. But a thing to remember here is that if you end up losing your device or if the browser’s storage is cleared, you would lose out on the private key because it is locally stored. That said, your tokens are safe and you can always retrieve your wallet to access them. Let us learn how to do that!
How to restore an existing Sollet Wallet?
Restoring an existing Sollet Wallet is nothing short of a cakewalk. All you need to do is click on the Restore Wallet link right below the Create New Wallet box that appears on the first screen that you see when you open the website. Upon doing so, you would see something similar to the image below on your screen.
Remember the seed phrase that you were asked to store safely? Well, now is the time to put it to use. Enter your seed phrase in the first section. If you had set a password while creating your wallet, you would need to enter that in the third section. If not, you can leave this field blank. And if you want to create a new password for your wallet, you could do so in the second section.
If you’re restoring your wallet because of your previous device being stolen, I would strongly recommend adding a new password to your wallet.
Once you’re done entering all the details you wish to, click on the Next button. This should take you to a screen that shows you a list of all the derivable accounts as can be seen in the image below.
If you’re satisfied, go ahead and click on the Retrieve button and you’ll be back in your wallet again.
Restoring your wallet removes any traces of existing wallets on the device. So you must use it with caution.
What is the SOL token?
SOL is the governance token of the Solana blockchain. Solana is an open-source project implementing a web-scale blockchain. The Solana blockchain provides secure, scalable, and fast decentralized apps and marketplaces.
The system supports 65,000 transactions per second (TPS) with a block time of 400ms. And that is not even the upper bound for the system. In fact, on a standard gigabit network, the system can support up to 710,000 TPS! Granted, the transactions should not be more than 176 bytes large on average.
Before you go…
The DeFi space is changing faster than anyone ever expected it to. With more and more innovative projects making huge differences in the world of finance, there is really no saying what kind of projects await us.
That said, there are a few projects such as the Solana blockchain that look promising and have been loved by all. The Sollet Wallet still has a long way to go before it can compete with the big guns.
However, the tides seem to be in the Sollet team’s favor since everyone is loving the wallet.