I want to tell you something nobody told me before I started this.
Building tokens on Solana is not complicated. The CLI does most of the heavy lifting. You run a few commands, something appears on-chain, and you can verify it in a block explorer within seconds. That part is genuinely smooth.
What is not smooth is the moment you realize how differently Solana thinks about money, ownership, and rules compared to everything you have built in Web2. That mental shift is where the real learning lives.
This is my honest account of building tokens on Solana for the first time, covering everything from a basic mint to soulbound credentials that cannot be transferred. I am a web developer still learning. These are my notes from the trenches.
Starting point: creating a basic token
