📚Mission 5 - SOLANA
Learning to sign transactions with Phantom
We are learning a lot of new things. In the last mission, we understood Solana's explorer, SolanaFM, and learned to visualize our transactions in detail, understanding all the fields and what they mean.
However, there is a type of operation that fits the concept of no-fee, that is, it is not necessary to spend fees to be carried out. It is called a signature.
1. What are signatures?
Signatures have been used for a long time in our society, and they serve as an authentication mechanism, proving your identity through a signature. In the web3 world, we also have this signature process, which is widely used in login systems. For this, we have a common image of the login paradigm in the different phases of the web:
Signatures serve to prove that you own the wallet, that is, that you have its private key, which is often used to log into systems, as shown in the paradigm above.
With the arrival of web3, login will be much simpler, using signatures to prove your identity. In addition to being a much faster and more convenient format, it is as safe as the previous methods.
Remember: be careful where you connect your wallet for authentication. Malicious websites may use your data for harmful purposes.
2. Learning to sign a message
For this mission, we built a special website to interact with Phantom and sign a message.
To access the website, visit: https://missions.melkdao.xyz/en/solana/mission-5
Your screen should look like this:
It's important to highlight that this transaction has no financial cost, as signing transactions does not generate any fee.
To execute this mission, you will need to first connect your wallet and give consent to the site to read the information on your wallet. Click on the green button "Connect". Phantom will then show a pop up to connect with the site, click on "Connect".
Once you connect your wallet, you should see you wallet number appear in the website page:
This means you are connected.
3. Signing the Message
Now click in the webpage click on "Sign" to sign a message.
By clicking on the sign button, the site will use the public address of your wallet and the message to produce a unique signature hash, which will prove that your address signed the message. The unique hash will be the proof of mission 5.
The next screen is the signature request and will look like this image:
It is important to notice the title of the window, which says "Sign Message".
Also note that the message you are signing appears on this screen, in this case "MELK Solana trail".
The button is also pretty straightforward and says "Sign". When you come across a request like this, rest assured that you are not at risk of spending money or losing the coins in your wallet.
Click “Sign”, and your screen will refresh.
To copy the signature hash, click on it:
Congratulations! You signed for the first time with your wallet. No information was registered on the Blockchain and so there was no need to pay fees.
The site now has your accomplished signature, and having knowledge of the message that was signed, it can validate that you are the holder of the private key relative to the wallet's public address.
This ensures that only you and no one else can generate this signature. This process proves your identity. It is a simple, effective and secure login system.
4. All ready! Now post the signature hash on Discord
Head over to the Mission 5 channel on discord and post your signature hash to earn 10 MELK.
Quick reminder! This mission does not give us access to any sensitive data in your wallet, only your public address, balance and basic read permissions so that the signature hash can be generated and used to verify your identity.
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