By running brew install solana on the macOS Terminal, I installed the Solana command-line interface on my computer. "Solana is a decentralized blockchain built to enable scalable, user-friendly apps for the world," reads Solana.com. There's an average of 2,477 transactions per second with a cost of $0.00025 each. The amount of validator nodes is 1,414, and the total transactions made up to this moment are 51,981,076,509. Their site claims that Solana will be low-cost and fast, forever. I have an empty Solana wallet created with Exodus for iOS/macOS, which ends up being reduced to a pass-phrase composed of twelve English words. To depict what that may look like, I obtained the following words by running the solana-keygen new command.
First run this command.
solana-keygen new --no-outfile
You can opt to associate a passphrase to your seed phrase, which is highly recommended for adding an extra layer of security.
wish fatal benefit theory scheme burger scale guess switch chair cotton luggage
Note that this is an empty wallet that doesn't belong to me. But that list of words, optionally protected with a second password, would unlock a digital wallet. In this case, it'd be a Solana wallet, but if you created a passphrase with an app like Exodus, the same wallet would be able to hold multiple tokens (say, Bitcoin or Ethereum). Here, we would be managing our own wallet and addresses, whereas if we were to obtain digital currencies through an exchange like Gemini, Coinbase, or Binance, they'll own the wallets, accounts, and pass-phrases to move the assets around, which you can access and manage authenticating with your username and password.
In case you want to send a token of appreciation my way, here's my Solana address. =)
GF14Kk1Deh7BjjxBUR9zSgV47EKuZNmb8eRcmaDxjbX9