From Email & Passwords to Keypairs: Understanding Identity on Solana

If you’ve spent years building in Web2, identity probably feels straightforward: users sign up with an email, set a password, and your backend stores their credentials. Every app has its own system, and identity is fragmented across services. Solana flips that model completely. Instead of usernames and passwords, identity starts with a keypair — a cryptographic pair of keys generated locally. The public key is your address (visible to everyone) , and the private key is your proof of ownership. T