When I first read "everything in Solana is an account" — I had exactly three questions on my mind. 🤔

What does "account" even mean here?

What does "everything" actually look like?

And... why?

If you, like me, come from a Web2 background and live with an assumption that data lives somewhere "magical" ✨ — some lowest layer under the world — you know the feeling. You deploy your backend, your database spins up, and data just... exists. It's not your primary concern. You're thinking about APIs, auth, maybe caching. Storage is already handled — a line item on your AWS bill, baked into your infra cost, invisible by design.

Nobody told you to think about it first hand. So you didn't.

But in Week 2, when I was learning about the fundamental unit of data storage, Solana said: everything is an account .…