Cryptocurrencies have gained a lot of popularity throughout the last years and even NFTs have become a topic of popular culture. Among the coins that have gained popularity last year one stands out especially: Solana. Offering lightning fast transactions without almost any gas fees while allowing for Smart Contracts, this Network has quickly gained traction and rose from being a fairly unknown coin right into the top ten of crypto. With the overall crypto market being on a big dip right now, there has rarely been a better opportunity to enter this booming ecosystem and prepare for all the emerging opportunities that it’s DeFi and NFT space will provide this summer.
First you will need to create an account on a centralised exchanged on which you will be able to purchase the coins. For the sake of this tutorial, we will be buying Solana on FTX, but it is up to you to choose an other exchange such as Binance or Coinbase if you prefer.
Simply enter ftx.com in your web browser and click “register” in the upper right corner of the page.
You will be guided through the account creation by FTX from here and it would be redundant to provide an explicit guide for that part. By the end of the process, you will have verified your identity to FTX and set up a two factor authentication to keep your account and funds secure.
After you have signed in to your account, a new tab called “wallet” will appear on the upper left.
Clicking this button will take you to the following interface:
Click “deposit” USD, in order to be displayed various ways by which you can make a payment to your FTX account, simply choose the one that you prefer.
After you have placed your deposit, click “convert”, which will open this interface:
Type “sol” into the field labelled “to coin” and choose the amount of USD that you want to convert to Solana, then press “convert”. Congratulations, you are now an owner of Solana! However, in order to actually participate in the opportunities of the Solana Ecosystem, you’ll need to transfer your SOL to your own wallet on the Solana Blockchain.
There are many wallets available on the Solana Network, but the most popular, user-friendly and sophisticated one is Phantom Wallet. Luckily, though the process of setting up a crypto wallet is not as familiar as the standard account creation required for FTX, it is much simpler, as your wallet will be anonymous and you will not need to enter any data besides a password.
First you will need to visit the page “phantom.app”. Simply click “Add to Firefox” (or Chrome or whatever) and click “add extension” on the web store page that this will take you to.
After you have now added the extension, a little button will appear in the upper right corner of your web browser, bearing the Logo of Phantom Wallet. Click that button in order to begin the process of setting up your Phantom Wallet.
Click “Create New Wallet”. You’ll now be presented with a secret recovery phrase such as this:
This will be your only way to restore your wallet if you should for example lose access to your PC. It is also one of the only ways that an outsider might attain access to your wallet. Therefore it is important to store this information in a place that you’ll remember and that is very secure.
Afterwards you will have to choose a strong Password for your wallet. Without the Secret Recovery Phrase you will not be able to access the wallet from another computer, therefore the password serves as an additional protection in case someone should attain unwanted access to your system. After choosing the Password, wallet creation is already finished, clicking the Phantom button in your browser will now open your wallet.
To add funds to your wallet you will now have to withdraw the SOL that you purchased on FTX.
First copy the address of your wallet by clicking on it. Then go back to FTX and after finding “Solana” in the list of balances click “withdraw”, which will open this window:
Paste the Address you just copied into the space labelled “SOL Address”, choose the amount you wish to withdraw and enter your 2FA code at the bottom, before clicking withdraw to complete the operation. Within a few minutes, you will find see your balance displayed in your Phantom wallet!
In order to use your SOL to interact with the Solana ecosystem, you will need to connect your wallet to various websites. Luckily this is very easy and comfortable, as you can just connect each site directly to your Wallet without creating any further accounts.
In order to learn this, you can enter “raydium.io” in your web browser. This page is a popular Decentralised Exchange on which you can exchange your SOL for other tokens which are stored on this blockchain and engage in various decentralised finance opportunities such as staking. Simply press “Launch App” and then “connect” in the upper right corner. Your wallet is now connected w
ith the decentralised exchange and you can for example swap your SOL to other tokens which are traded on the Solana Blockchain. You can try the same procedure to connect to “magiceden.io” which is one of the most popular marketplaces for NFTs.
*This article is not a financial advice!
