Funding Your Wallet
This guide is intended to walk you through funding your wallet with USDC/USDT and SOL.
Last updated
This guide is intended to walk you through funding your wallet with USDC/USDT and SOL.
Last updated
In order to use Popular, you’ll need a balance of both USDC/USDT and SOL in your Solana wallet.
Trading is denominated in USDC/USDT (a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar) - so you're trading/paying/winning in something which has real, stable, fiat value.
SOL (the Solana blockchain’s native cryptocurrency) is required to cover the minuscule costs of authorizing transactions on the blockchain (~$0.0025) and cover the refundable ‘account rent’ for storing your data on-chain.
Currently, Popular applications only list USDC/USDT-denominated markets. USDC/USDT is the most widely used stablecoin on Solana.
For markets to be truly denominated in another cryptocurrency would lead to multiple distinct (fragmented, and less liquid) markets to exist around the same events. This would not be a good outcome for market participants.
Solana is a blockchain platform designed to enable decentralized, scalable applications. Solana is very fast in terms of the number of transactions it can process and has significantly lower transaction fees compared to blockchains like Ethereum. Solana is also the only blockchain capable of rivalling the speed and throughput of Web2 exchanges (400ms block times, up to 65,000 transactions per second).
Solana’s native crypto currency is Solana (SOL). SOL is used to reward the ‘nodes’ that operate the network for processing transactions and storing data.
A minuscule amount of SOL (~$0.0025) is required to cover the cost of each transaction and some SOL is required to ‘rent’ the space required to store any information on-chain - you can think of this as a redeemable deposit.
USD Coin (USDC/USDT) is a type of cryptocurrency that is referred to as a stablecoin.
As USDC/USDT is pegged to the U.S. dollar, you can always redeem 1.00 USDC for $1.00 USD, giving it a stable price. USDC/USDT is designed to let dollars move globally from your crypto wallet to other exchanges, businesses, and people.
Each USDC/USDT is backed by one dollar or asset with equivalent value, which is held in the accounts of regulated financial institutions. When you trade with USDCUSDT, you can think of it as trading using USD - it’s just an on-chain representation of the U.S. Dollar.
While SOL is native to the Solana blockchain, USDC/USDT is not. USDC/USDT exists on the Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, TRON, Algorand, Stellar, Flow and Hedara blockchains. To interact with Popular you will need USDC/USDT on Solana – known as SPL USDC/USDT.
Here are a few recommended ways to get your first SPL tokens:
Buy it on a centralized exchange like OKX, Binance, or Coinbase and send it to your SPL token wallet;
Buy it from your wallet directly through on-ramp services like Moonpay (although this is generally quite expensive)
Covert your ERC-20 (Ethereum) tokens to SPL (Solana) tokens using Wormhole — a cross chain bridge that moves tokens from one chain to another (recommended only for advanced users)
Learn more about stablecoins. .