From Clean APIs to State Archaeology: Rethinking Data on Solana

Diving into blockchain data (Solana specifically) changed how I think about “data” entirely 👇 At first, I expected something like a clean database—tables, rows, easy queries. Reality? It’s raw account state + transactions. Public, yes… but you have to decode and interpret everything yourself. ⚡ The “click” moment: You don’t query data—you reconstruct it. State isn’t handed to you; it’s derived from how accounts change over time. 🧩 Biggest surprise: How low-level it gets. Working with bytes, la