Getting Started with Solana: How to Create a Phantom Wallet & Get Devnet Tokens
Step 1: Create a Solana Wallet
Crypto wallets come in many different shapes & forms. The most user-friendly "hot" wallets are based on browser extensions and mobile apps. Some of the best non-custodial Solana wallets (by popularity) include:
For the sake of this guide, we will use Phantom Wallet—which is the most popular crypto wallet for the Solana blockchain. Go to the Phantom Wallet website and choose where you want to install the wallet—depending on whether you're on desktop (and what browser you have) or mobile.
Once you install the extension on your browser of choice, a new tab will open up and guide you through the process of creating a wallet:
Click on create wallet and add a password!
Once you enter a password, you will be shown 12 words, a seed phrase that is very important for your wallet. If you lose the seed phrase you won't be able to recover your wallet later on, so store it carefully! This also needs to be private otherwise someone can access all your funds.
Now, we have our wallet created! 🎉
We will switch to devnet because that is a testing environment where it doesn't cost real money. So, click on the badge in the top left corner > Developer Settings > Change Network and choose "Devnet".
Step 2: Get Funds Onto Your Solana Wallet
Now we need funds to make transactions on Solana.
So let's get some funds from a faucet!
Head over to our Faucet, enter the address of the wallet that you just created and hit enter! You will now see a popup that your funds have been sent.
If we check our wallet we have 1 sol now, yay! You can now build all the cool stuff you want to build with Solana 😎!